Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Maryna Viazovska

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. (non-admin closure) DavidLeighEllis (talk) 01:44, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Maryna Viazovska[edit]

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WP:TOOSOON. Subject has written a paper with a purported solution. The paper has not yet been published or even refereed. ubiquity (talk) 17:52, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Ukraine-related deletion discussions. ubiquity (talk) 17:55, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. ubiquity (talk) 17:55, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:43, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Weak keep. I considered making this article myself, eventually passing on it because I felt that it would be hard to defend at an AfD. But we have plenty of sources on her (multiple) new results, calling them a major breakthrough [1] [2] [3] [4]. It's probably too soon for WP:PROF but this work may already pass WP:GNG. And eventually she's going to be notable by our usual standards, based on the work she's already done, so what's the point of deleting the article and then coming back a couple of years later and re-creating it again? —David Eppstein (talk) 18:40, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Comment: Part of the problem for me is that the article, as currently written, only asserts that she has done this terrific thing that she really hasn't done yet - sort of like an article about a runner that only asserts "Runner X says he will break the three-minute mile this summer." It also provides no sources, in an arena where the average reader can't be expected to be able to sort out reputable references from hype. If you think she's done lots of other notable stuff, and if there are sources that say so, why not add that to the article, and make it about her being a notable mathematician or academic in general? You (or whoever) can add that she has an as-yet unpublished paper that is expected to solve the sphere-packing problem. Then, if it's proven that she has solved it, that statement can be revised. But as it stands now, I think there's not enough meat in the article to be worth keeping. ubiquity (talk) 18:56, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  - So your problem is that it's a brand-new stub, whose creator has requested help expanding it at WT:WPM, and that there hasn't yet been time for that expansion to happen yet. Got it. But that's not much of a valid deletion rationale. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:50, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- No, my problem is it's a completely unsourced article that makes a single assertion about something that might not happen. To me that's a valid deletion rationale. If the article can be expanded into something reasonable, that's great. Maybe it should just be Draftified to give people a chance to improve it, or to wait it out until it's true? ubiquity (talk) 20:08, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  - It is not completely unsourced. Your problem is that the sources are listed as "external links" and not properly formatted as sources, because it's a brand-new stub that still needs work. But the sources are already there. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:31, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- It's not about something she has not yet done. The paper is written and publicly available on the web. It has not yet appeared as a refereed publication. But respectable mathematicians are saying she's solved the problem. It's not like saying someone will run a three-minute mile this summer; rather it's like saying they've already done it but the judges' official ruling hasn't been publicly announced yet. Michael Hardy (talk) 03:45, 1 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Weak delete. I realize there has been something of a stir in the blogosphere about this problem being recently (allegedly) solved. But I'm not generally very impressed with popular media as sources for scientific subjects, and this is no exception. The subject does not (as of yet) pass WP:PROF, and while it certainly seems possible that eventually she will, I don't feel like we're there yet. Sławomir
Biały 21:31, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Changed !vote to weak keep. The unambiguous assessment of Sarnak, noted below, lends considerably greater reliability to the fluff news sources referenced in the article. I think the subject now meets GNG. Sławomir
Biały 17:45, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Weak keep -- I think the deletion argument given in the nomination is very weak; she is the subject of reasonably serious news coverage (in particular, the Quanta article) now, not after the paper gets published. --JBL (talk) 22:14, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Weak keep vote from me too. Tayste (edits) 22:29, 31 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: It is said that popular media are cited as sources. Let us note that within the last few days a mathematician who won a Fields Medal and who has somewhat diverse mathematical interests edited several sphere-packing-related articles on Wikipedia to assert that this new discovery has been made. The paper, if not yet refereed, is publicly available on the arxiv and seems to have received favorable notice from respectable mathematicians. We can't cite those facts as reliable sources, but they are evidence that we will soon have better sources to cite. Michael Hardy (talk) 03:26, 1 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Obvious keep she meets WP:GNG (this is pretty rare for mathematicians, specially for young ones), and also per common sense, because so many notable mathematicians are favourable impressed by her work, and they know math better than most Wikipedia's editors. (I don't know if I can comment here without an account, but I felt I should) 189.63.176.45 (talk) 10:28, 1 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Just to note that commenting without an account is completely ok, as long as you don't then weigh in a second time under a different identity. However, the decision will be made according to the consensus of policy-based arguments, rather than on the number of people choosing one side or the other, so your choice to invoke GNG is a much better way to go than Tayste's WP:JUSTAVOTE. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:22, 1 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. The objection seems to be that she has not yet accomplished the feat described. The grounds for thinking that is that her paper hasn't gone through the refereeing process yet. There is a difference between saying she hasn't done it and saying it's not yet formally recognized by a standard process. In many cases, one might have no authoritative assurance of soundness besides that process. In this case, we have this item (also perhaps not yet refereed) in which it appears that four mathematicians other than Maryna Viazovska who are competent to publish research in this area state that she solved the problem in eight dimensions, and risk damage to their reputations for being wrong in a way that a referee would not, since referees are (almost always) anonymous. We also have one Fields-Medal-winning mathematician asserting the same thing in his Wikipedia edits. The fact that something is in some sense official or formal doesn't always mean it's more credible or done more competently than otherwise, nor even necessarily that it's less "authoritative" in the sense that would be relevant here. Michael Hardy (talk) 01:52, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. Coverage, though recent, is significant. The coverage to date already meets WP:PROF ~~criteria~~ criterion #1. ^Bongo_matic 09:06, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

(Any chance I can convince you to say "criterion #1"? And similarly "This criterion is..." and "These criteria are..."?) Michael Hardy (talk) 00:16, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Keep -- per enormous amount of coverage as GNG if people want to actually claim that it's not PROF#C1 yet. (P.S. in addition to the policy points, please consider know how unfriendly towards women this and their achievements AfD makes Wikipedia look.) -- Michael Scott Cuthbert (talk) 02:03, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think "friendliness" or "unfriendliness" is a consideration. This should be an argument to avoid during deletion discussion. I still don't see coverage in reliable scientific sources, like review articles in peer-reviewed journals, textbooks, etc. The citations in the article are to Forbes, The Huffington Post, and similar, which are not reliable peer-reviewed mathematical sources. Sławomir
Biały 14:28, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, but they quote other mathematicians, who've read the papers. Peter Sarnak has commented: “It’s stunningly simple, as all great things are. You just start reading the paper and you know this is correct.”[5] --Amakuha (talk) 16:13, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Keep per WP:PROF, as the result obtained by Maryna has already received a wide coverage in the scientific community as well as in the media. --TheStrayCat (talk) 22:58, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per WP:GNG + WP:PROF. Note: Viazovska claimed that she and her colleagues have used a computer to validate the proof of 24-dimensional case (automated proof checking?).[6] I suppose, they already did the same for 8-dimensional case, as the proofs are really similar and concise (the second paper is just 12 pages long). --Amakuha (talk) 06:57, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qlZjarkS_g the computer part is verifying positivity of the modular forms she constructs, and that part could in principle be done by hand. It's not like Hales' huge computerized case analysis. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:46, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  What I mean is, they've already verified the proof on a computer (at least they claim so). So there's a very little chance that there is a mistake and the proof is wrong. --Amakuha (talk) 23:57, 7 April 2016 (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.