Talk:Ordinal number

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Mathematics GA‑class High‑priority

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Talk:Ordinal number/Archive 1

Members of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles are in the process of doing a re-review of current Good Article listings to ensure compliance with the standards of the Good Article Criteria. (Discussion of the changes and re-review can be found here). A significant change to the GA criteria is the mandatory use of some sort of in-line citation (In accordance to WP:CITE) to be used in order for an article to pass the verification and reference criteria. Currently this article does not include in-line citations. It is recommended that the article's editors take a look at the inclusion of in-line citations as well as how the article stacks up against the rest of the Good Article criteria. GA reviewers will give you at least a week's time from the date of this notice to work on the in-line citations before doing a full re-review and deciding if the article still merits being considered a Good Article or would need to be de-listed. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us on the Good Article project talk page or you may contact me personally. On behalf of the Good Articles Project, I want to thank you for all the time and effort that you have put into working on this article and improving the overall quality of the Wikipedia project. Agne 05:48, 26 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

From the article:

One can define addition, multiplication, and exponentiation on ordinals, but not subtraction or division.

This seems to be contradicted by the MathWorld article on ordinals[1], which gives as an example:

${\displaystyle \omega +...+\omega \over r}$

where r is a real number. How is this to be explained? Simões (^talk/_contribs) 05:28, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My first reaction was, in general, don't be surprised if you see nonsense on MathWorld. That's maybe a little unfair; their actual common sin is more promoting neologisms as though they were standard usage, which I guess isn't quite as bad as actual false statements.

In this case, though, there's nothing wrong with what they actually wrote. You need to look at it a little closer. That isn't a fraction sign, and r is presumably not an (arbitrary) real number. --Trovatore 05:57, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What you saw there is NOT an underline indicating division, it is a brace indicating that there are r copies of ω being added together to get ω·r . JRSpriggs 09:07, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The article needs a nontechnical section at the top of the introduction. Currently, it immediately dives into the mathematics. Pcu123456789 04:39, 27 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that it wouldn't hurt to add some intuitive motivation. However I don't agree with the {{confusing}} tag. It's a mathematics article, after all, so the complaint about "diving into mathematics" is a bit odd. The tag should be reserved for articles whose logical structure is unclear, not those that need to be made more accessible. Discuss the latter issue on the talk page, not the article page. --Trovatore 05:23, 27 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

'Ordinal number' or 'ordinal' is a concept that is understood not only by small children, but even by rhesus monkeys !!! So I understand the frustration of Pcu123456789 and respectfully disagree with user Trovatore who says that "It's a mathematics article" : No, it is totally wrong to assume user typing common english word like 'ordinal' into Wikipedia has a PhD in math and wants to read only about set theory. I also disagree that all languages that have ordinal numbers are 'English' so I removed otheruses tag to Names of numbers in English and created a linguistic stub instead. I have seen other examples in Wikipedia, where small explanatory sections like this were used instead of full disambig page so I hope that is OK Warbola 01:18, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, this article is and always has been about mathematics. If you can find references discussing a non-mathematical meaning other than just the linguistic thing about words like "seventeenth" (I'm curious how one might do an experiment showing that Rhesus monkeys distinguish ordinals from cardinals), then by all means, write it up and put a disambiguation link to it. But please don't muddle the issue in this article. --Trovatore 02:02, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I understood your 'mathematics' meaning 'hard core set theory'. I you are willing to include things like simple counting of numbers to 'mathematics' then I am with you and apologize for misunderstanding. About ordinal numerical abilities of rhesus monkeys, [2] should make things very clear. Warbola 04:17, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No, I'm not willing to include those. I'm saying "ordinal number" has a specific meaning to mathematicians, and that meaning is what this article is about, and I would like it to stay that way. Whether this article is correctly named is a separate issue -- you can see in the archive of this talk page that I suggested it should be at a title like ordinal number (mathematics) or ordinal (mathematics). (By the way, from a brief glance at the abstract, what the monkeys seem to have understood is what mathematicians would call a linear order.) --Trovatore 04:26, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You 'have been over this issue many times', yet are not willing to fix the problem ? Why ? In Google, just "Ordinal number" "database" alone gives two times more hits than "ordinal number" "set theory", so other meanings clearly deserve short explanation or disambiguation. If you do not like my version of the clarification, why not make your own? And what was wrong with link to Ordinal numbers (linguistics) stub other than it was written by "wrong" person ? Warbola 12:59, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]