Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Christopher J. Bishop

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. While there seems to be no-consensus over whether the research fellow-ship is a sufficient award, and only partial consensus over whether being an invited speaker is sufficient, there does seem reasonable consensus that the citation counts and discussion of his work mean WP:PROF is satisfied. (non-admin closure) Nosebagbear (talk) 22:30, 3 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Christopher J. Bishop[edit]

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No evidence of satisfying Wikipedia's notability guidelines. He appears to be a perfectly ordinary academic. Eleven of the fourteen of the references are papers by him, not about him, two merely include him in lists, and the other one is a paper which refers to a result of his, but is not about him. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 06:47, 28 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Keep: if I understand correctly, being an invited speaker to ICM a big deal. Sloan Research Fellowship is also a (quite?) selective scholarship. I guess it’s matter of what is “ordinary”. For me, he looks more than an ordinary mathematician. —- Taku (talk) 08:35, 28 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

OK, perhaps "ordinary" was not the best word to use. Certainly most academics don't receive a Sloan Foundation fellowship, so you could say that makes him more than ordinary. However, it is another matter whether this is "a highly prestigious academic award", which is the only criterion at Wikipedia:Notability (academics) that could possibly be considered relevant. The award is a grant for "support of early-career researchers", in the wording of the Sloan Foundation's own web site. Of course they select early-career researchers who they think show more promise than most, so in that sense you could say the beneficiaries of the grant are more than ordinary researchers, but merely receiving that grant does not in itself indicate more than that they show early promise, and thousands of people have received the grant. Awards listed at Wikipedia:Notability (academics) to indicate what are regarded as "highly prestigious" awards are the Nobel Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Fields Medal, the Bancroft Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. We are not even remotely near to that level of "highly prestigious". Christopher Bishop was given a Sloan Fellowship 26 years ago, which indicates that at that time he showed promise. By now he has had time to establish his notability by getting coverage that satisfies the general notability guideline, or by receiving some other, more prestigious award, or anything else. There is no indication that he has done so. The editor who uses the pseudonym "JamesBWatson" (talk) 09:09, 28 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 11:49, 28 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

My argument was not he is notable because of that scholarship alone; all I'm saying is it is an indication of potential notability and evidence of significant contributions to the field (cf. the comment below). The requirement contains the wording "there should be strong evidence of independent research accomplishments." The difficulty seems that whether "strong" for them is strong for Wikipedia. I don't think the standard should be Fields medal or equivalences; that's way too high. If your argument is Sloan may be selective but not selective enough for Wikipedia, then I can be sympathetic to that argument. In any case, an AfD is a place to determine that. -- Taku (talk) 23:08, 28 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Comment For WP:PROF#2 the subject would need a "highly prestigious" award like the ones listed above. But for WP:PROF#1 the Sloan Fellowship and ICM invitation can count as multiple contributing factors to "significant impact in their scholarly discipline," at least according to the Specific Criteria Notes in WP:PROF. Bakazaka (talk) 18:25, 28 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. I just added two published book reviews to the article. That wouldn't be enough for WP:AUTHOR by themselves but I think that and the ICM invitation push it over the top. I note also that he has three papers with over 100 citations each, possibly enough for WP:PROF#C1 in a low-citation field. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:52, 29 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@David Eppstein: I'm probably missing something: Those three papers that you mention have citations of his own books? Shouldn't rather WP:PROF#C1 be satisfied by books being published by others, who cite Mr. Bishop's work? --1l2l3k (talk) 13:20, 29 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Those three papers are each cited by over 100 other scientific publications, mostly written by other people, as counted by Google scholar. More specifically, according to GS, 264 other publications cite Bishop's "Hausdorff dimension and Kleinian groups". 157 cite "On conformal dilatation in space". And 111 cite "Harmonic measure and arclength". —David Eppstein (talk) 16:00, 29 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:53, 29 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, basically per David Eppstein. An ICM invited talk would have been enough for me. Also, Bishop also has papers (all but one solo authored) in the very top math journals Annals of Mathematics (1990, 2001, 2007), Inventiones Mathematicae (1997, 2014, 2018), Acta Mathematica (1993, 1997, 2015). Certainly satisfies WP:PROF#C1. Nsk92 (talk) 20:58, 1 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Keep A healthy citation profile for a low-citation field, the Sloan fellowship, the ICM invited talk and the book reviews add up to a case for notability. XOR'easter (talk) 15:55, 2 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Keep: meets WP:PROF based on citations and authorship. K.e.coffman (talk) 02:10, 3 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.