• Owl [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    19·
    24 days ago

    Yeah, math wikipedia is pretty egregious. It’s not even that it’s for a technical audience, it’s more like it’s for an audience who already knows the thing. Or it’s just someone trying to show off how much jargon they can use to define a thing.

    But it can be fixed! Look at the opening paragraph of Field_(mathematics) from 2015

    In abstract algebra, a field is a nonzero commutative ring that contains a multiplicative inverse for every nonzero element, or equivalently a ring whose nonzero elements form an abelian group under multiplication. As such it is an algebraic structure with notions of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division satisfying the appropriate abelian group equations and distributive law. The most commonly used fields are the field of real numbers, the field of complex numbers, and the field of rational numbers, but there are also finite fields, fields of functions, algebraic number fields, p-adic fields, and so forth.

    What the fuck is that, right?

    And the version now:

    In mathematics, a field is a set on which addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are defined and behave as the corresponding operations on rational numbers do. A field is thus a fundamental algebraic structure that is widely used in algebra, number theory, and many other areas of mathematics.

    • addie@feddit.ukEnglish
      13·
      24 days ago

      For a long time, the editors of maths Wikipedia took objection to any ‘simplifying’ edits to make things more accessible, if they even slightly changed the meaning. Seems like a misunderstanding of what an encyclopedia is for, to me - overview first, expand afterwards. But I suppose mathematicians wouldn’t be mathematicians if they weren’t borderline obsessive. That first definition is probably more ‘correct’ although you’re quite correct that it’s almost unreadable.

      Huh. Didn’t think that a field needed to have division defined on it, at least not in the ‘multiplication is the opposite of division’ way you’d expect. Learn something new every day.

      • SockOlm [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        18 days ago

        Huh. Didn’t think that a field needed to have division defined on it, at least not in the ‘multiplication is the opposite of division’ way you’d expect. Learn something new every day.

        actually I dont think it does. A field has addition and multiplication as operations.

        To get subtraction you have a negative element for each element in the field (such that a + (-a) = 0). similarly there is an inverse of every element exept 0 (a * 1/a = 1)

        but then it might aswell be like defining 4 operations so thats maybe a better way to think about it

    • sodium_nitride [she/her, any]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      8·
      24 days ago

      At least fields are an easy enough topic so once you see a example it clicks. But for the more niche topics where you really need a simple explanation cause the concept is complicated, the wiki writers will give you a definition that needs a whole degree in math to understand.

      Even though the theorem is supposed to be usable by engineers and physicists too (cause you know, we also gotta use this shit to do our work).