Category talk:Subject:Mathematics

TOC for Geometry Book
There is a small problem or question I have about the mathematics books which I have put on the talk page of the geometry book, but I think it is relevant to put here or somewhere for math topics. It is about that there seems to be some 'set in stone' TOC for that and maybe other books that some academic group is deciding has to be used. What group is it and why do they think they know best? I need to know as a student, tutor, and possible future formal teacher of math.--Dchmelik (talk) 00:00, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Differences between Category and Subject hierarchy
I see no problem with the Category hierarchy and Subject hierarchy not matching. At the moment Category:Pure mathematics only has subjects in it, but I think that is OK. Just noting the difference so that people who care can discuss if they think it needs to change.JamesCrook (talk) 11:55, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Our subject hierarchy is not a tree (logic is parented by computer science and pure mathematics). An item can have multiple parents.  We also have a strong bias against large numbers of items in the same subject.  Our presentation of subjects using templates means that about nine sub-subjects and maybe 15 books is about right.
 * A normal category hierarchy, not counting the actual topic pages, is a tree. The category pages have no problem with larger numbers of subcategories (18 for Mathematics) and pages in those categories.


 * I don't have a problem with categories and subjects not matching either. However I've always felt since before the proposal for the subject namespace that using a hierarchic approach was a bad idea for organizing books. I actually had this idea of a subject namespace as a way to move away from using hierarchies. There are many many many essays out there explaining why hierarchies are bad. I think subjects ought to be able to scale to include many books and subtopics just like categories. I'm a bit disappointed with the child/parent idea that has developed, I rather think of subjects in terms of their relevance to one another with links to other subjects serving to show relevance. I had created a template for use in the subject namespace myself which would of make things a bit neater, but somebody removed it from all the pages I had it on. Maybe I'll attempt to update the current template to use some of the ideas I was using in the template I created. I think books and subjects would scale a bit better than. --dark lama  12:48, 13 November 2010 (UTC)