Talk:Ngô Bảo Châu

Page contents not supported in other languages.
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Family name

Sources suggest that his family name is Ngo rather than Chau.[1] —Preceding

Rumping (talk • contribs
)

Of course his family name is Ngô and not Châu (which is his given name), you can see that his father's full name is Ngô Huy Cẩn. Grenouille vert (talk) 18:14, 22 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
So when the article uses a single name, should that be Ngo?--
Rumping (talk) 20:53, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply
]
No, per the custom for Vietnamese people, they should be referred to by their given name. DHN (talk) 23:25, 19 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I know nothing about Vietnamese naming conventions beyond what I've read in this article, but it seems to be a fact that among mathematicians he's referred to as Ngo, not Chau. For example, the official laudation for his Fields Medal refers to him as Ngo. It's conceivable that because he lives in the USA, he's adopted the convention used there. To refer to him as Ngo may be in some sense incorrect, but it appears to be the common usage. 86.0.200.220 (talk) 06:00, 25 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If he's adopted Western customs to refer to his name, then his full name should be referred to as "Bao-Chau Ngo", not "Ngo Bao Chau". DHN (talk) 22:47, 31 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think people are confusing the usual convention in English print media with cultural customs. For example, a Japanese newspaper or book would never refer to the person known in the English-speaking world as Akira Kurosawa by the name "Kurosawa" but instead they would choose "Kurosawa Akira". The custom of referring to a famous person in print by solely their family name is not Japanese (of course addressing someone face-to-face with an honorific is a different matter). Yet the Wikipedia article refers all over to "Kurosawa", and indeed that holds in much written discussion of him and his works. Are we supposed to re-edit Wikipedia to replace all mentions of "Kurosawa" by "Kurosawa Akira" because that's the Japanese custom? It's a convention in English to refer to these famous people by their family names, hence "Kurosawa", hence "Shakespeare", and hence "Ngo". It seems preposterous that we've purposefully chosen to ignore that in this one article. --DudeOnTheStreet (talk) 21:43, 10 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

When referring to Japanese people by a single name, their family name is used, regardless of whether in an English or Japanese publication. When referring to a Vietnamese person by a single name, their given name is used. This is not an English convention or a Vietnamese convention, it's just how it is. Even the CIA World Factbook follows this [2]. DHN (talk) 18:27, 9 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move: Removing diacritics

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a
requested move
. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Move - Published English-language sources most commonly omit Vietnamese diacritics, therefore Wikipedia's guidelines about foreign names and anglicization is in support of removing the diacritics from the articles in question. Neelix (talk) 20:32, 18 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • Ngo Bao Chau
  • Le Hong Anh
  • Pham Van Dong
  • Le Duan
  • Nguyen Tan Dung
  • Nong Duc Manh
  • Tang Tuyet Minh
  • Phung Quang Thanh
  • Nguyen Van Thieu
  • Tran Van Tra
  • Nguyen Minh Triet
  • Nguyen Phu Trong

– Vietnamese diacritics rarely appear in English-language writing, not even in Encyclopedia Britanica or National Geographic, both of which use diacritics for other major languages. They are not used by the

WP:MOSBIO. The article title should be the version of the name that we want the article to index at, and how we want search engines to find the article. Like a book title, an article title is intended for a wider audience, so characters likely to be unfamiliar to the reader should be avoided. Kauffner (talk) 17:05, 25 June 2011 (UTC)[reply
]

Here’s who they are, together with diacritic-free usage examples from either Britannica or VNA:

A similar proposal is currently under discussion at Talk:Đặng Hữu Phúc. —  AjaxSmack  01:00, 29 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • Weak Support proposal seems reasonable, readers of en.wiki aren't likely to type in the diatrics. But honestly I'm not too bothered either way. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 17:29, 25 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support based on the prevailing sentiment at
    WP:FOUR) 22:29, 25 June 2011 (UTC)[reply
    ]
    • Celine Dion is an American resident and does not use diacritics on her name. Apples and oranges. —  AjaxSmack  00:56, 29 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strongly support. In the case of Thieu, widely known in English for fifty years without diacritics, long overdue; the others are equally reasonable. The diacritics (as in the parallel case of Franz Josef Strauss) should of course be documented in the article, where convenient in the first line. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:42, 26 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Definitely oppose. I already got involved in the analogous discussion at
    jfk, rather than the President's full names, when I wish to read something about President John F. Kennedy. That's what the search bar is for, and that's what redirects are for, and that's what Template:Foreign character is for, and that's how we ought to be serving our readers. --Theurgist (talk) 17:10, 1 July 2011 (UTC)[reply
    ]
  • Support. Agree that we need to clarify some issues, but the current practice and policy is to use English. Andrewa (talk) 04:37, 3 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose, I still don't see how the encyclopedia is improved, or who is helped, by doing this. We use diacritics regularly for names in most Latin-alphabet-based languages - why treat Vietnamese differently? It's clear enough what the underlying letters are, for those who (like me) don't know what the diacritics mean, so the titles are no less recognizable with the diacritics included.--Kotniski (talk) 11:17, 3 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The main problem is that Vietnamese names are not given with diacritics by any published English-language source. For Nguyen Van Thieu, I found 1 example on Google Books with diacritics out of 6,180 post-1980 mentions. Kauffner (talk) 16:02, 5 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support Follow English usage, as verifiably documented through our sources. This makes our articles easier to find, more likely to be returned in search requests, and more credible to the wider public. Anyone who needs to be educated the original spelling of his name will see the information immediately at the top of the article. Per WP:COMMONNAME, WP:ENGLISH. Erudy (talk) 14:25, 10 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. This is merely another case of diacritic-omission for the convenience of foreign (here, = non-Vietnamese) typists and printers. As Wikipedia has the full Unicode typecase set available, why not use it? Anthony Appleyard (talk) 05:43, 18 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a
requested move
. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The link to "Paul Germain" obviously leads to the wrong person, someone accidentally having the same name! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.98.30.178 (talk) 08:54, 15 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ngô Bảo Châu own preference

Requested move 2

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was moved. Closing comment at the bottom. --BDD (talk) 19:04, 4 October 2012 (UTC) (non-admin closure)[reply]

– Ngô Bảo Châu (Fields Medalist, Vietnamese mathematician professor in Chicago and Paris) per his own personal preference “Ngô Bảo Châu” on his Chicago webpage, per sources incl. New Scientist, Nature websites. Plus the two “fathers” of Vietnamese mathematics Lê Văn Thiêm and Hoàng Tụy less known in the west,

WP RS “the best such source” “reliable for the statement being made”, see recent RM consensus at Talk:Paul Erdős and Talk:Ilie Năstase In ictu oculi (talk) 18:03, 30 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
]

(i) En.wp editors are perfectly capable of distinguishing
WP:UE continues "..if there are too few reliable English-language sources to constitute an established usage, follow the conventions of the language appropriate to the subject (German for German politicians, Portuguese for Brazilian towns, and so on).... Names not originally in a Latin alphabet, such as Greek, Chinese, or Russian names, must be transliterated.
. But we don't Romanize names which are already Roman.
(ii) There was extensive response to the above arguments only 2 weeks ago in Talk:Ngô Sĩ Liên and Talk:Hồ Quý Ly, both of which received strong support to treatment equivalent to that given French and Czechs. And the mathematical sources here are considerably stronger than for either of those biographies. In ictu oculi (talk) 12:29, 31 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
"No established usage" isn't even one of the top five
WP:DIACRITICS and other provisions of the guidelines. Kauffner (talk) 11:10, 1 September 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
Quote: "Redirect is cheap in Wiki". Yes, surely it is cheap if you are not paying the bills. But it's surely true that redirects on popular pages would soon bring Wikipedia to its knees. *Quote: "If there are too few reliable English-language sources to constitute an established usage, follow the conventions of the language appropriate to the subject". The conventions for Vietnamese are described here. LittleBen (talk) 04:30, 2 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note that Vietnamese does not have to be used in titles—it should NOT unless unavoidable, because it forces a redirect for every access, as virtually nobody searches for article names using a search term with diacritics—but both diacritic and non-diacritic versions should be used in the lede, and diacritics can be used in the body. English Wikipedia article titles should as far as possible be words that English-speaking people can read, write, and remember. LittleBen (talk) 04:30, 2 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose: Surely the same idiotic "misspelling" argument applies to Chinese, Japanese and Korean as well: if you don't "spell" names in the native language—and use the native language order, which is reversed (surname first) in Japanese—then you are "misspelling" them. Nonsense, you romanize them—and use the English name order, like major English sources do, regardless of how the individual concerned does it on his personal web site. LittleBen (talk) 04:30, 2 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
You seem to be arguing that Chinese names should use English name order "like major English sources do". But no one ever says "Zedong Mao", etc. PS, redirects are indeed very cheap, and in any case there is absolutely no Wikipedia policy that tells us to choose titles based on some supposed (and probably entirely negligible) redirect processing impact. And finally, nothing on a wikitravel.org URL constitutes a Wikipedia policy, so why even cite that? — P.T. Aufrette (talk) 05:48, 2 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I said that major English sources—like the English press, and publishers—use English name order and not reversed name order for romanized Japanese names—regardless what a Japanese individual uses on his or her personal web site. So what a Japanese individual uses on his or her personal web site or in publications by his or her employer is irrelevant. Wikitravel policy—to NOT use diacritics in article titles—is sensible, because it puts users first—(Quote: "English Wikipedia article titles should as far as possible be words that English-speaking people can read, write, and remember")—and uses existing standard conventions for romanization, as discussed above.
  • Repeating: "Note that Vietnamese does not have to be used in titles—it should NOT unless unavoidable, because it forces a redirect for every access, as virtually nobody searches for article names using a search term with diacritics—but both diacritic and non-diacritic versions should be used in the lede, and diacritics can be used in the body". LittleBen (talk) 14:44, 2 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Like most slippery-slope arguments, this one is inane. The difference between languages written in a variant of the Latin alphabet and those not is natural and obvious; this proposal applies only to the former case. --
talk) 14:35, 2 September 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
Please use preview so that you don't make 10 edits for every comment, and please stop ranting -- your comment merely repeats the same bad argument as the original. There is a difference between diacritic marks on (or other minor variants of) the Latin alphabet and completely different alphabets (or non-alphabetic writing systems), and so your argument is not germane to this discussion. Also, if you respond to this comment, please do not merely repeat the same argument again. --
talk) 18:42, 2 September 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
  • Did you even bother to research usage on the web? Even in Vietnam, the version without diacritics is far more frequently searched for. Did you notice the page title (in the browser toolbar) here? Surely it reads "Ngo Bao Chau's homepage" without diacritics? We're discussing article titles here, not use of diacritics within articles. LittleBen (talk) 01:51, 3 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support
    Le Van Thiem → Lê Văn Thiêm per nom. He is notable almost exclusively for activities in Vietnam and, strictly speaking, doesn't have an "English" name. —  AjaxSmack  03:16, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply
    ]
  • As a journal author, the third name is given as "HOANG TUY" (no diacritic) here and here . Who "just changed" the name? Kauffner (talk) 22:07, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The idea that Wikipedia should misspell names because other sources have done so is very strange, especially when the other sources references often have such misspellings due to technical restrictions that do not affect Wikipedia. --
talk) 22:17, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
What about Voice of Vietnam? They don't have the technical capability give Vietnamese spelling? National Geographic gives diacritics for many, many languages. But for Vietnamese they say, "the number of accent marks can be distracting and may therefore be omitted."[3] A title should inform the reader, tell him how a name is normally given in English-language sources. So if the sources don't use diacritics, it is misleading to put them in regardless of why they are omitted. Kauffner (talk) 23:27, 14 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
@Paragon, thanks for your comment - while you didn't cite a policy, what you said is enshrined in
User:Prolog/Diacritical marks etc., so it shouldn't need restating that news agency websites tend to use ASCII The Voice of Vietnam website "Francois Hollande" is a ASCII website, so yes an ASCII website doesn't have the "technical capability" (by choice) to represent French names. Even AFP, Monsieur Hollande's own news agency doesn't "have the technical capability" (by choice) to represent the French President's name. But since en.wikipedia is not a news ticker tape, we do not let this influence in François Hollande article. Searching ["Francois Hollande" -"François Hollande"] in Google illustrates that en.wp does not follow the majority of sources even for simple cases like French names. We certainly do not follow majority sources for Czech, Polish, Turkish, Maltese. Ngô Bảo Châu actually has far better English sources (not least his own Chicago CV and math publications) than most of the Czech, Polish, Turkish, Maltese articles on en.wp. And yet they are all, 100% at full Czech, Polish, Turkish, Maltese spelling. So why are some of us singling out Vietnamese people for special treatment? In ictu oculi (talk) 02:54, 15 September 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
The VOV site is not wire service feed. And they can certainly put a cedilla on "François Hollande when they choose to do so. There is nothing about diacritics in
WP:BLP. It says, "Be very firm about the use of high-quality sources," not "source it to a personal Website." Other encyclopedias don't use Vietnamese diacritics. Maybe there is a reason. Kauffner (talk) 05:33, 15 September 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
  • There are surely naming conventions (p.24) (that apply to birth certificates, passports and the like) for US nationals. Of course other countries have similar naming guidelines for passports. International sporting events like the Olympic games have similar rules. The reason is simply accessibility and usability -- non-English words and names are not widely used in English media. The whole idea of English Wikipedia is to make knowledge widely accessible to people who have grown up in English speaking countries and have not learned diacritics.
  • Wikipedia has not had any RfC, and surely does not have any guideline, that says that diacritics must be used virtually universally in titles of articles relating to Europe (or Vietnam, for that matter) for the same reason—accessibility and usability.
  • It is acceptable to have both foreign and romanized forms of names in passports, and it is acceptable to have both foreign and romanized forms of names in the lede and body of Wikipedia articles. (But it is surely not acceptable to add diacritics to article titles and then use that as a reason for removing English versions from the article body, except for simple and well-known names like Pele.)
  • How many of the people who have apparently been invited along to this discussion are active in the Vietnamese part of English Wikipedia, and are familiar with the country and its culture? LittleBen (talk) 15:13, 15 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support; more accurate spelling. bobrayner (talk) 17:03, 23 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I know that I'm opinionated when it comes to diacritics in personal names, although I've shied away from Vietnamese ones. So perhaps the closure should be left up to someone else, but I see a discussion that's been open for over a month with pretty clear consensus. I'm ruling it moved. --BDD (talk) 19:04, 4 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

External links modified (February 2018)

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 3 external links on Ngô Bảo Châu. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018.

regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check
}} (last update: 18 January 2022).

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 08:04, 18 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

French or not?

The lead sentence of the article describes Ngo as "Vietnamese-French". Another IP would like to remove the descriptor "French", based on a variety of arguments (see the edit summaries of recent edits to the article). I would like to keep the descriptor, since it is accurate (Ngo has French citizenship) and expresses an important piece of his biography (citizenship + PhD awarded + 20ish years of residency + several academic positions there). Can other editors please weigh in, in order to establish consensus? --173.79.47.7 (talk) 22:59, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Radical suggestion: Remove nationality from the lead sentence. It is not that important for mathematicians. The nuances can be explained in the body. --Trovatore (talk) 23:34, 6 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
In general, if we do not have
WP:BLP. In this case, we do have sources, but they state that he has both citizenships. So my position is that either we should omit the citizenship as too unimportant for the lead, or list both. To choose one or the other is to editorialize without justification. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:17, 14 March 2019 (UTC)[reply
]
I agree with David Eppstein here. Per
WP:ETHNICITY, it's fine to give Ngô's nationalities. Dropping it is also fine, per Trovatore, but I wouldn't mind seeing it stay given Ngô's recent work in the development of mathematics in Vietnam (e.g. the newly-created Vietnam Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics). — MarkH21 (talk) 18:36, 15 March 2019 (UTC)[reply
]
I agree that both or neither seems right in the abstract. And his connection to Vietnam seems significant enough that I wouldn't want to drop that from the lead. [Edit to add: looks like MarkH21 and I were writing the same thing just at the same moment!] --
talk) 18:39, 15 March 2019 (UTC)[reply
]

Unexplained deletion of sources

Some IP editor keeps deleting a bunch of sources with no explanation (first [4] with an edit summary that does not appear to relate to the edit, most recently [5]). Can I get a second opinion on whether this is defensible or not? (In the latter case, I will

talk) 23:59, 18 November 2019 (UTC)[reply
]

I agree with you that the IP editor's repeated deletions without explanation are indefensible. NealKoblitz (talk) 16:23, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your input -- I have (again) restored the references, and hopefully the IP editor will try to explain their edit. --
talk) 16:34, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply
]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Ngô_Bảo_Châu&oldid=1207609444"