User talk:William Hart

[User-supplied bio goes in User:Your Name]

Welcome

Tasks: start a new article • add basic, wanted or requested articles • add definitions • add metadata • edit new pages

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start, and see Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, our help system and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forum is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any user or the editors for help, too. Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun!

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Kind Regards, Robert Tito | Talk 08:09, 15 February 2007 (CST)

ID

Hi William, thanks for the start on intelligent design. Could you give us a bio please? --Larry Sanger 09:07, 15 February 2007 (CST)

Apologies for not realising this was a better place for questions about bio details. You've answered the point of my question pertinently and appropriately. I intend to delete my remarks from the talk page on the article (but will revert if you'd prefer they remain there). David Tribe 07:54, 17 February 2007 (CST)

Sure, no problems. I was never a big WP contributor, so I don't really know much about the best way to do things. You're welcome to delete the comments from the discussion page along with my response if you want, or leave it there as you wish. You could even transfer it all to this page if you wanted. But maybe it isn't that important. To further answer your questions, I'm actually considering not contributing much more to the article, just to see how it develops from here. I think it is fairly neutral (apart from the Popper comment, which I think Gareth contributed), and I'm just curious to see how it "evolves" under the "intelligent" direction of future contributors. Your summary for your single edit to the article was pretty funny by the way. I feel that my piles and arthritis were perfectly designed to achieve their end. :-) William Hart 08:06, 17 February 2007 (CST)

I'm relieved that I have'nt seriously offended you. I'm sill thinking of relegating Popper name to the footnotes.!I really welcome much your copy edits on HGT ( I have since installed Firefox 2 with its spell checker and those issues will go away now I hope. I've slapped a To Approve tag on V 1.1, 24 hours time limit. More seriously and genuinely, I've reflected further about your credentials for ID, ans on the basis or neutrality now see that you may be ideally qualified. I hope that you take my clumsiness as a disincentive to participate further. The story cries out for an ending. I might sometime find time to do the flagella bit. I had to stay away the last 24 hours David Tribe 15:48, 18 February 2007 (CST).

PS As far as rules, I think that getting to know each other is a phase that we'll go thru; puzzeling remarks become less worrying after that occurs. Ive genuine jokes can be misinterpreted. Be aware that dealing with odd situation here requires the wisdom of Solomon. BTW I learnt that the correct term for an organism in the Domain Archaea is archaeon (noun) and Ive got to find my error on this somewhere and correct it! David Tribe 15:56, 18 February 2007 (CST)

Thanks for the encouragement to continue adding to the article on ID. I'm a bit worried about being the person who "finishes the story". I'd really like to see some other qualified individuals add something. As for it being a story, I'm not so sure I can make it so. I've always struggled with writing compelling prose (comes from being a mathematician). To me, the story needs a list of the principal arguments from the ID camp and a list of the primary scientific objections to those arguments (with citations where possible). Trouble is, that takes the article out of the woolly beginning it currently has and into the realm of "oh, I have to actually do lots of extra reading to make a good job of this". I mean, I know the basic story, but I have higher standards than that, and I'm just not sure I have the time to invest. I might consider adding intermittently as I find the time. I'd particularly like to add something about the No Free Lunch theorem and Dembski's search spaces. It's a concept that WP doesn't even mention IIRC. But understanding Dembski's papers, even for a mathematician, is a non-trivial task!! I understand what he's getting at, but understanding the actual mathematics is somewhat of a chore. Separating the philosophy from the mathematics which models it is also quite difficult.

As for being neutral, it isn't that hard for me as an academic without much invested in the issue. I'd like to see ID presented in a completely neutral way. ID is portrayed by its adherents in such a positive light and by its opponents as such a hindrance to progress that it is hard to sit back and truly assess it for what it is, on intellectual grounds. Very few people but academics and intellectuals with nothing to lose by doing so, actually want to consider the issues on intellectual grounds. Most people actually don't care if the concept has content or not. They only care if the idea of an intelligent designer makes them happy or angry. William Hart 18:11, 18 February 2007 (CST)

fundamental domains in elliptic curves article

Hi - thanks for all the corrections in this and in the hyperelliptic curves article. However, in one of them we are in disagreement: the fundamental domain of the uper-half plane under PSL_2 cannot be a closed set: we can take only half the points on the boundary. Do you agree ? I want to change it back.--dlehavi 22:36, 22 February 2007 (CST)

Hi David - Usually the fundamental domain is as I have defined it, i.e. it is a closed region for which every z \in H is PSL_2(Z)-equivalent to a point of the domain, but for which no two points in the interior are PSL_2(Z) equivalent (two boundary points are permitted to be equivalent).

A standard reference for the definition as I give it is Neal Koblitz "Introduction to Elliptic Curves and Modular Forms", or Serge Lang, "Introduction to Modular Forms" or Anthony Knapp, "Elliptic Curves", etc. In particular, note that Wikipedia is incorrect in its definition. I also believe William Stein uses the same definition as me, and he is a recognized authority. I understand why one may wish to exclude half the boundary, but convention has the terminology apply to a closed (and usually simply connected) region.