Talk:List of publications in mathematics
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Why the name change? Listing 'all and any' publications isn't so reasonable.
Charles Matthews 09:35, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
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Merging lists
I have taken the existing list that was a sub-section in List of mathematics history topics and attached it to this article (removing Elements to avoid duplication). I have left this as a pure list - others can add summaries in the style of the Elements section if they wish - my own opinion is that this duplicates the contents of the articles themselves, and so List of ... pages should just be pure lists. Gandalf61 15:25, Jun 18, 2004 (UTC)
What about works that are very important but do not qualify as publications? For example, Thurston's Princeton lecture notes. It created new areas and introduced many breakthroughs, some of which are not clearly understood still. Chan-Ho Suh
Formatting
Can we use just one system of formatting entries on this page? Having half the entries in one format and half in another makes it hard to read. I've marked this article as needing cleanup. -- Fropuff 04:32, 2005 Feb 4 (UTC)
- Made format of all entries consistent with format of majority, and removed cleanup notice. Gandalf61 10:21, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)
Goal of this list?
A rather bold question: what is this list good for (other than honoring great authors and works)? Isn't it more reasonable to have literature (of which there is usually a lot, even if one only considers the great contributions!) within the respective (main) articles? Or is there an effort to create an external bibliography to avoid repetition? I greatly agree to having good lists of commented references for all math topics, but is it helpful to have all in one list? Won't it just explode?
To substantiate this, consider the list of category books given at topos theory. Quite some of them are to be considered "great" and they are very different in purpose and targeted audience, but all of them would be classified as "introduction" here. And of course, there are varying opinions on the quality of a book. Mac Lane is wonderfully to the point and quite condensed (compare Johnstone), but I would consider Lawvere/Rosebrugh as an easier introduction and Borceux as a better comprehensive reference work. Shall this list contain all these books only as introductions? When adding works for the other types of publications, the category theory literature alone would make quite a long list. Can the completion of the present article thus really be a goal to pursue?
Maybe a list of "famous historical math publications" would yield an interesting subset of the present list? --Markus Krötzsch 20:43, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
That the publications are 'notable' is always implicit. Well, this list was created by analogy with some other lists, for other academic areas. I think it is supposed to list the 'breakthrough' papers; that means it might help someone who wanted a list of the 50 most important theorems of all time ... Anyway if someone wants to build up such a list, it will do little harm. Charles Matthews 23:06, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
- As the intro. says, this list was originally intended to be "a list of important publications in mathematics, organized by field". It is part of a series of "List of publications in ..." articles (see the "Lists of publications in science" category). It was supposed to be an index to other articles rather than just a list of titles i.e. each of the publications in the list should have its own main article (although this rule was never explicitly stated, and has not always been followed by subsequent editors). What qualifies as an "important publication" could be debated endlessly. There was a separate list of historical publications articles at one point, but it was merged into this list, as there seemed little point in having two potentially overlapping lists. If the number of articles on publications in any one topic area became large enough, then it could be factored out into its own separate ""List of publications in ..." article. Gandalf61 10:52, Feb 21, 2005 (UTC)
Suggestions for additions
How about the following publications? EGA and SGA by Grothendieck et al for algebraic geometry; "Topology from the Differentiable Viewpoint" by Milnor for differential topology; "Topology" by Munkres for general topology; "A Course in Arithmetic" by Serre and/or "Basic Number Theory" by Weil for number theory; "Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces" by Halmos for linear algebra; "Modern Algebra" by van der Waerden for abstract algebra; "Elements of Set Theory" by Enderton or "Set Theory" by Jech for set theory. Some of the books are important as standard and popular introductions to the subject and some for historical significance (e.g. Grothendieck's works). Thoughts? nparikh 18:58, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)
Yes to: EGA, SGA, the Milnor book, the Weil book, the Halmos book, the German version of Modern Algebra. The rest, I think, don't have enough innovation (the Serre book is very good, but not very original). Well, I guess that's true in the case of the set theory, but there I'm not an expert. Charles Matthews 19:19, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)