Talk:Klaus Roth

Klaus Roth has been listed as one of the Mathematics good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. Review: May 10, 2020. (Reviewed version).

A fact from Klaus Roth appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 21 May 2019 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows: Did you know... that Fields Medal-winning mathematician Klaus Roth performed so poorly on the Mathematical Tripos that his tutor suggested he take "some commercial job with a statistical bias"? A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2019/May. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Klaus Roth.

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Is that the way he pronounces the name himself? If not, Klaus Roth is a German name (he was born in Breslau, according to the article), and the German pronunciation of Roth is [ro:t]. --141.20.202.201 16:27, 18 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have assumed it is the [rəʊθ] pronunciation in my conversion to IPA. If the final decision is [rəʊt] feel free to change it, or get in touch and I will correct it. --Slp1 23:48, 21 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As the normal German pronunciation is [ro:t] as stated above, I have removed the IPA. Should Roth himself insist on an anglicised pronunciation, we should give a source for that. --131.152.41.173 (talk) 13:55, 2 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Object not found! http://mathunion.org/ICM/ICM1958/ The link on the referring page seems to be wrong or outdated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Roth

Davenport, H. (1960), "The work of K. F. Roth", Proc. Internat. Congress Math. 1958, Cambridge University Press, pp. lvii–lx http://mathunion.org/ICM/ICM1958/

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 148.87.19.218 (talk) 13:51, 18 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That took much longer than it should have to respond, but I replaced the url. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:18, 28 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This review is transcluded from Talk:Klaus Roth/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Starsandwhales (talk · contribs) 15:25, 26 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! I'll be reviewing this article over the next few days. starsandwhales (talk) 15:25, 26 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)
It is reasonably well written. a (prose, spelling, and grammar): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists): It is factually accurate and verifiable. a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR): d (copyvio and plagiarism): It is broad in its coverage. a (major aspects): b (focused): It follows the neutral point of view policy. Fair representation without bias: It is stable. No edit wars, etc.: It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate. a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
Overall: Pass/Fail:
· · ·

• No copyvio obvious
• Like the previous quote, you should state who's saying the quote.
  • Which previous quote? —David Eppstein (talk) 20:19, 26 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Sorry I forgot to actually mention what I was talking about. I was wondering who calls it Roth's greatest achievement, and who is being quoted when the article says "that gave him the greatest satisfaction". Is the latter necessary to quote? Who's quoted for "quite sensational" and "of considerable importance"?
      • Ok, I attributed these opinions. I agree that a direct quote was not necessary for "satisfaction" and have rephrased. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:32, 28 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Why does 1953 link to a source?
  • Whenever the text provides a publication date for one of Roth's publications, it is linked to the entry in the "selected publications" for the same publication. However, they are not sources, and therefore they are deliberately not linked using footnotes as if they were sources: they are works by Roth, not works about him or his contributions, and the article content is based on what other reliable sources say about them, not what they say themselves. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:33, 26 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Ok.
• You could mention the significance of some of the awards. Ex. mentioning that the De Morgan Medal is the London Mathematical Society's most prestigious award
  • There is a description of the significance of the awards already present, in the "source of amusement" sentence. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:19, 26 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• In the lead should it be "He was also a winner of the De Morgan Medal and the Sylvester Medal, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society."?
  • That would be grammatical, but it would be unnecessary, because it would be redundant and it would be excess verbiage to repeat the same verb in the same sentence, as you seem to want me to repeat it. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:19, 26 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'm just saying that because of the use of "and" with the two awards.
      • I don't feel like taking the effort to diagram the (correct) grammar of that sentence for you, but the two instances of "and" are at different levels of structure. In "He was also a winner of the De Morgan Medal and the Sylvester Medal, and a Fellow of the Royal Society", "the De Morgan Medal and the Sylvester Medal" is the object of the preposition "of". The object of the verb "was" is also a compound conjunction, separated by "and", with the first of the two compound things being "winner of..." and the second being "a Fellow of...". The need to pause in speaking the sentence, to more clearly separate the first and second parts of the outer conjunction, is why there is a comma before the second "and". You're asking me to change "He was X and Y" to "He was X and was Y" (where X itself happens to be compound), but I don't think that is either necessary or an improvement. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:06, 29 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• The phrasing of the sentence "With Heini Halberstam he was the author of the book Sequences on integer sequences." is awkward
  • I removed Halberstam from the lead to make the sentence structure simpler, and used the word coauthor instead of author. (Halberstam's co-authorship has not been removed from the article, of course; just from the lead.) —David Eppstein (talk) 20:19, 26 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• The career section can be further developed by talking about when his major contributions took place. What did he do while he was a professor? What did he do while he was chair in pure mathematics?
  • That is in the contributions section. I deliberately separated out his career milestones from his contributions to avoid cluttering the two sections with material that properly belongs in the other section. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:19, 26 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant something more like mentioning that "During this time period he worked on [insert major contribution] so that the timeline connects better? And then go into more depth with the contributions section
      • The three contributions that are major enough to have separate subsections were all more or less at the same time. But I added a brief mention of their timing (and the timing of the Fields) to the career section. (I also added something about the significance of the Fields there. Given how far its significance exceeds that of the other awards, I don't think we need to detail the significance of those other awards.) —David Eppstein (talk) 05:46, 28 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• When did he become a schoolteacher?
  • Given that this sentence is sandwiched between his finishing at Cambridge in 1945 and his acceptance to graduate study in 1946, I would think the answer is obvious. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:19, 26 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Ok seeing as I am very dumb and can't draw inferences, maybe mentioning that he was a school teacher for less than a year or something similar would be helpful.
      • Spelled out. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:34, 28 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Did he work closely with Davenport on a particular subject or were they just colleagues?
  • If he had any significant collaborations with Davenport they were not reported in the sources I used, which collated his significant research contributions. I cannot report on what the sources do not say; that would violate WP:SYN. MathSciNet does report the existence of two 1955 joint papers with Davenport and Roth, related to Diophantine approximation; I don't know whether they are significant enough to include, but we would need sources that say so. (We do have published reviews of the individual papers in MathSciNet and presumably also in zbMATH but they usually only tell us what's in the paper, without putting it into a broader context. MathSciNet lists 41 papers by Roth and we shouldn't try to cover them all; then it wouldn't be selected publications.) —David Eppstein (talk) 20:37, 26 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Would it be significant enough to mention that they collaborated on a paper?
      • I don't think we have sources that summarize his joint publications and how important the collaborations were. We do already have a (sourced) sentence in the career section that he worked closely with Davenport in the late 1950s to early 1960s, though. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:36, 28 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Is there more information of what he taught? It's mentioned that he had a few doctoral students, is there any more information beyond that?
  • Spelled out more explicitly that the MGP lists only two students, and mentioned that the one we already detailed (Chen) worked in discrepancy. I don't know anything more than the name of the other one. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:57, 28 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• The bit about "countering the threat to British mathematics" is.. I don't know if it's weird but it doesn't feel like it fits. Maybe changing it to talk about how people wanted to persuade him to stay in the UK?
  • It's an opinion of the people involved at the time. I attributed it to make it clear that it was their opinion rather than something we are saying in Wikipedia's voice. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:46, 28 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• In the section about arithmetic combinatorics, would it be notable to mention some of the "other authors" that strengthened Roth's bound on the size of progression-free sets?
  • It's spelled out in the linked main article, Roth's theorem on arithmetic progressions, in the section "Improving Bounds", of which the sentence you refer to is a summary. See both Wikipedia:Summary style and WP:GACR rule 3b. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:11, 29 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]