My talk page | My sandbox

Mathematical topics | Mathematical lists | Mathematicians | WikiProject Mathematics | Mathematics Wikiportal

How to write a Wikipedia article on Mathematics | TeX markup | Boilerplate text

Introduction

I very much welcome comments on any of my contributions (naming, format, style, contents, usefulness etc etc) - post a message at User_talk:Gandalf61.

As for myself ... I am British so I enjoy :

• The outstanding comedy of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers
• The animation of Nick Park
• Singing along with Flanders & Swann
• Eating Marmite on toast
• Drinking dandelion and burdock and warm beer (but not both at the same time)
• ... and playing Diplomacy, Risk and, of course, Mornington Crescent

Articles

Articles that I have started or made a substantial contribution to include :

2003

• Abstract structure - a gap that needed filling because there was a link to it from the mathematics page
• Proof by exhaustion - an important method of mathematical proof that has some controversial applications
• Constructive proof - a complement to the nonconstructive proof article, and completes a link from mathematical proof
• Generating function - replaced a redirect to formal power series with an article on different types of generating functions and their uses
• Farey sequence - just couldn't resist filling out the previous stub
• Ford circle - a natural link from Farey sequence
• Kepler conjecture - a fascinating problem, and an example of proof by exhaustion
• Sphere packing - a requested article that provides context for the Kepler conjecture
• Mathematics as a language - completes a link from mathematical proof
• Flanders and Swann - expanded previous stub
• Polydivisible number - an intriguing backwater in recreational mathematics
• Octave Chanute - American railroad engineer and aviation pioneer
• Coniston Water - scene of Donald Campbell's death in 1967

2004

• Abstraction (mathematics) - link from abstract structure
• Riemann hypothesis - added history section
• St. Elsewhere - new article
• Modular group - expanded existing article
• Fractal - added history section
• Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture - added background section and expanded rest of article
• Julia set - amended general definition of Julia set
• Fatou set - new article, link from Julia set
• Lucas sequence - new article, link from Fibonacci pseudoprime
• Disquisitiones Arithmeticae - new article, link from Carl Friedrich Gauss and number theory
• Vorlesungen über Zahlentheorie - new article, link from number theory
• Mathematical beauty - re-write of existing article
• Mathematics and art - split out from mathematical beauty
• How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension - new article, link from fractal
• Voronoi diagram - added history section
• Project Excelsior - new article, link from Joseph Kittinger
• Pendine Sands - new article, written because I went there on holiday
• K'nex - expanded previous stub
• Rare Earth hypothesis - made existing article less rhetorical, more NPOV
• Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life - new article, book by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart
• Moving average (finance) - a family of common technical analysis techniques that deserved their own article
• Lyapunov fractal - expanded previous stub
• Apollonian gasket - new article on a very beautiful fractal
• Benoît Mandelbrot - expanded existing article
• Lévy C curve - new article, link from fractal
• Lévy flight - expanded previous stub
• Lévy's constant - new article
• Paul Pierre Lévy - expanded previous stub
• Ruth Lawrence - expanded previous stub
• Notes & Queries - new article celebrating 15th anniversary of column in The Guardian

2005

• Zeckendorf's theorem - new article, referenced in Fibonacci number
• Edouard Zeckendorf - new article
• Mathematics education - re-wrote and expanded previous stub

To Do

Erdos - agnostic not same as atheist

Write article on An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

Write articles on world water speed record , Bluebird (car) and Bluebird (boat)

Hilbert's problems - some problems do not have pages - fill in gaps

In particular, write an article on Hilbert's eighteenth problem