[WikiEN-l] Foundational rumblings

[Jay Litwyn]

"Charles Matthews" <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote in message 
news:4AB356B7.3090306 at ntlworld.com...
> Over in the recondite if productive arena of WikiProject Mathematics,
> fresh eyeballs have been looking over articles in areas that retain a
> structure imposed up to five years ago, and not much liking what they
> see. Basically there were POV forks introduced in areas, to calm down
> edit wars, at a time when the "POV fork" concept was not so well
> understood. I remember well the relief with which User:Kevin Baas was
> given a sandbox for his treatment of tensors.
>
> So now it doesn't all look so good any more. This cuts to fundamentals,
> because mathematicians feel that the topic sentence in an article should
> serve as a definition. For comparison, I looked at [[quantum field
> theory]] for a comparison: reads "Quantum field theory (QFT) provides a
> theoretical framework for constructing quantum mechanical models of
> systems classically described by fields or of many-body systems." So it
> tells you what QFT does, not what it is (unsurprising, with the jury
> still out). The mathematicians' take is clearly limited to areas where
> you can say definitely what something is (i.e. the domain of axiomatic
> definitions).
>
> That being said, there seems to be the scope for clarifying how an area
> that is axiomatic should be organised according to our revered
> principles of summary style (WP:SS). There are numerous instances, it
> seems, where we have "menu style" in place of "summary style", i.e.
> different treatments according to taste. The foundational issue does
> seem to need addressing, and could cause quite some upheavals (such as
> we have got out of the habit of living with). It could be that we now
> accept articles with titles like [[introduction to string theory]], as
> pedagogic stepping stones. But neutrality means, surely, that treatments
> that are really "introduction to X from the POV of Y" are out of place,
> or at least to be seriously deprecated.

In "The Edge of Tomorrow", Isaac Asimov did a good treatment of
forks in mathematics. Three of them stem from variations on
Euclid's fifth postlate, which defines parallel. It's an excellent book;
alternates fact with tangential fiction.
_______
Quantum Mechanics, n.: The dreams from which stuff is made.