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Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-08-28T20:50:23.000Z

Ilia Zaichuk Thanks for the edit! I made a couple of linguistic changes, and made the "uniqueness of " a bit less compact.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-08-28T20:27:14.000Z

Ilia Zaichuk: I've made the appropriate changes to the markup to make text display in MathJax (which is the LaTeX-syntax markup language used for maths on this site and on Stack Exchange). However, I think it's a bug in Arbital (which I've just pointed out to the developers) that it's not rendering correctly. (EDIT: I've altered the markup into a form that works around the bug. It just makes the markup look a bit less nice.)

In general, you can use \text{text here}; if you want to put maths inline with the text here, you can use dollar signs:

 \text{Heinz $57$ Varieties}

Additionally, if you have a mathematical string you want to typeset, like "sin", you can use \mathrm{sin} which shows up as . (It so happens that there is already a built-in symbol that does that for sin: \sin.)

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-08-23T01:58:03.000Z

This is not universally agreed-upon, but I use " decides whether or not holds" to mean " outputs if holds, and outputs otherwise".

If I said " decides if holds", I would consider that ambiguous: it might mean " outputs if holds" without the requirement on 's behaviour if doesn't hold.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-08-17T14:01:11.000Z

Looks good to me!

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-08-17T01:01:59.000Z

The non-existence of a total order on is fun and interesting, I think, and also not very difficult. An excellent exercise in proof by contradiction.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-08-15T03:05:06.000Z

I think the answer is no. Indeed, there are uncountably many , but only countably many machines which can access oracles.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-08-14T23:41:01.000Z

Surely they are equivalent. Given a Rice-deciding oracle, we can ask the oracle, "Does the partial function defined by machine specify where input should go?"; that determines whether halts on input or not.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-07-31T02:16:54.000Z

I think the halting problem probably should have its own page, rather than being linked to the umbrella uncomputability page.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-07-28T23:55:52.000Z

Simply that I didn't know the name :) I'll edit it in.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-07-26T02:24:39.000Z

Thanks: quite correct.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-07-25T04:31:52.000Z

I don't think this is what you mean, is it?

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-07-23T13:17:36.000Z

Are you otherwise broadly Math 3? It would be good to have a guinea pig for group theory.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-07-23T13:15:35.000Z

I think this actually belongs in the Multiplication article, but you're quite right that I've not been explicit enough. I intend to have a meditation on the various ways that the notation is consistent, but this one doesn't need any division at all so it should appear earlier.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-07-23T05:12:25.000Z

It sounds like you didn't already know what the free group is; in that case (and even if you did already know), it's very gratifying to know that someone is actually reading this carefully!

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-07-23T05:09:48.000Z

You're quite right to flag this up; I was being sloppy. There are three main ways to construct the free group, and I've kind of mixed together the two of them which are most intuitive. I'm trying not to simply define the free group here, but you're right that I've done it confusingly. I'll fix it.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-07-10T01:11:53.000Z

A summary of the relevant cardinal arithmetic, by the way (in the presence of choice): while

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-07-07T04:16:17.000Z

Something I learnt from Mietek Bak is that Löb's Theorem is kind of more subtle than this. In provability theory, it's fine to have a "box" operator that we informally read as "is provable"; but what Löb's theorem tells us that we can't simply interpret it literally as "is provable" without difficulties. One should define the "provability" predicate formally, to avoid getting confused (or one should specify that it is simply a formal symbol to which we have not assigned any semantic meaning, although that is somewhat against the point of the angle taken by the parent article); for example, the provability predicate could be defined by a certain first-order formula which unpacks a Gödel number, checks it's encoding a proof and verifies each step of the encoded proof.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-07-04T17:18:47.000Z

Have I gone mad, or do you mean "L(H|e) is simply the probability of H given that the the actual data e occurred"?

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-07-03T15:03:25.000Z

You're right; I was sloppy. I'll fix it, thanks.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-06-29T15:45:10.000Z

I've edited something about that into the text. Basically I think it's to do with the symmetry of the words in "one-to-one": it looks like it should go both ways, as "one thing in the domain hits one thing in the range, and vice versa".

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-06-28T21:06:28.000Z

To the original author: xkcd images are CC BY-NC (2.5), and as such require attribution.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-06-24T16:49:13.000Z

This page doesn't disambiguate between "left inverse" and "inverse". Strictly an "inverse" is a two-sided inverse, so gf = 1 and fg = 1.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-06-19T03:33:50.000Z

A question about the requisites for this page: should the alternating group on five elements is simple be a requisite? It's necessary for the base case of the induction, but one can probably understand the proof without it, simply referring to it as a known fact.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-06-18T15:29:36.000Z

I think this probably wants a diagram of the two graphs, being differently laid out in the plane but isomorphic.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-06-18T02:30:27.000Z

This is definitely a page which admits two lenses: the "easy" proof and the "theory-heavy" proof. What kind of lens design might people use?

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-06-16T14:12:51.000Z

"identity" is probably not a sufficiently specific link; I'd go for math_identity, probably.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-06-15T00:12:57.000Z

I feel like symmetric_group should be a requisite for this page. However, this page is linked in the body of symmetric_group, so it seems a bit circular to link it as a requisite. I think this situation probably comes up for most child pages; what's good practice in such cases?

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-06-14T23:36:20.000Z

None that I'm aware of, but I've found it convenient to know when I was doing exercises in a first course in group theory.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-06-14T23:35:27.000Z

I took the plunge and put it on its own page.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-06-14T19:23:11.000Z

Request for comment: is the definition of "cycle" something that should be on its own page? They're not about the symmetric group per se, but I've only heard of cycles being used in the context of symmetric groups.

Comment by ArbitalImport-patrick-stevens on [deleted post] 2016-06-13T19:46:30.000Z

I have a question about general Arbital practice here. A mathematician will probably already know what a group homomorphism is, but they probably also don't need the proofs of the Properties, for instance, and they don't need the explanation of the trivial group. Should I have split this up into different lenses in some way?