Talk:Serge Lang

Article status

Can someone explain to me why this is in the developed section? As far as I can tell, it is a reproduction of the Wikipedia article with only the second sentence changed and the bibliography removed.Barry R. Smith 11:38, 30 March 2008 (CDT)

I don't know how it got developed status. Originally I wanted to rewrite the whole thing, but never got around to it. Indeed, the structure of the wiki article is horrible... meanwhile you can figure out how to de-developed it, since I don't know how, and I'll chip away at it as I think more about a better structure for the article. Giovanni Antonio DiMatteo 12:06, 30 March 2008 (CDT)

I whacked away at it a bit more, putting it more into the form of a encyclopaedia biography; I think it's 'decent' on that front now. Since I know nothing of math, you all should check to make sure the math content is correct (I tried to change nothing at all, just rearranged existing text; my only new text was in the summary of his importance in the intro). J. Noel Chiappa 13:25, 30 March 2008 (CDT)

Fair enough, Giovanni. Your name wasn't the latest signature on the template. I am looking forward to seeing your edits. I am a big fan of Serge Lang, although by no means an expert on his life. For instance, I admit to being guilty of making fun of his stance on HIV in 'Challenges' as a younger man, ironically, I suppose, since I was also guilty of not having looked at the book. I am interested to know if you feel any material in the Wiki page was false, or just not representative of the great man. I wonder how the "neutrality" rule applies here -- I love his books for their comprehensiveness, but often dislike them because I find them difficult when first approaching a subject. I suppose part of being neutral would be omitting the latter sentiment, but can mentioning their comprehensiveness be considered a bias? You can certainly back it up by comparing "Algebra", "Algebraic Number Theory", and "Cyclotomic Fields I & II" with their competitors. (May I also assume that you created the Weil Etale cohomology stub? I am looking forward to you or anyone explaining that better, as it still seems totally impenetrable from the one talk I went to about it).

Anyway, I think I achieved the goal of changing it to "developing" status. I also left the underlinked category as 'y' but changed the 'cleaned up' category to 'n', because I figured if someone was wrong about the status, they might have been wrong about these fields as well.Barry R. Smith 22:31, 30 March 2008 (CDT)

Useful source

The Yale Daily News obituary seems like it has a lot of useful info (and can presumably be relied on); I haven't looked to see if all important data from it is in the article. J. Noel Chiappa 13:31, 30 March 2008 (CDT)