Template:Did you know nominations/Arithmetic

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Hilst talk 12:38, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Arithmetic

• ... that 1 + 1 = 1 according to some forms of non-Diophantine arithmetic? Source: ^[1]
  • ALT1: ... that the decimal system in arithmetic was invented in India? Source: ^[2]
  • ALT2: ... that the first mechanical calculators, developed in the 17th century, used gears, levers, and wheels to perform arithmetic operations? Source: ^[3]
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Scott Tower
  • Comment: ALT0 could be a candidate for
    WP:QUIRKY
    .

Sources

• Burgin, Mark (2022). Trilogy Of Numbers And Arithmetic - Book 1: History Of Numbers And Arithmetic: An Information Perspective. World Scientific.
  ISBN 978-981-12-3685-3
  .
• Caprio, Michele; Aveni, Andrea; Mukherjee, Sayan (2022). "Concerning Three Classes of Non-Diophantine Arithmetics". Involve, A Journal of Mathematics. 15 (5): 763–774.
  S2CID 231847291
  .
• Conradie, Willem; Goranko, Valentin (2015). Logic and Discrete Mathematics: A Concise Introduction. John Wiley & Sons.
  ISBN 978-1-118-76109-0
  .
• Lockhart, Paul (2017). Arithmetic. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
  ISBN 978-0-674-97223-0
  .
• O'Regan, Gerard (5 March 2012). A Brief History of Computing. Springer Science & Business Media.
  ISBN 978-1-4471-2359-0
  .
• Igarashi, Yoshihide; Altman, Tom; Funada, Mariko; Kamiyama, Barbara (2014). Computing: A Historical and Technical Perspective. CRC Press.
  ISBN 978-1-4822-2741-3
  .

Phlsph7 (talk) 09:52, 21 March 2024 (UTC).

•  Reviewing... Bennv123 (talk) 12:45, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

Policy compliance:

• Adequate sourcing: - In the "Approximations and errors" subsection, the line In the example, the person's height might be represented as 1.62 ± 0.005 meters or 63.8 ± 0.2 inches. is unsourced. Presumably it can be sourced to the same ref where this example came from in the first place?
• Neutral
  :
• Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook eligibility:

• WP:DYKCITE
  : "The facts of the hook in the article should be cited no later than the end of the sentence in which they appear." Hence for ALT1, there needs to be an inline citation at the end of the sentence Indian mathematicians also developed the positional decimal system..., as this is the sentence in the article that contains the facts of hook ALT1.
• Interesting:

Overall: Promoted to GA on 21 March. AGF on the offline sources. Prefer ALT0 and agree it would be a good hook for the QUIRKY slot. Waiting for above issues to be addressed before approving. Bennv123 (talk) 13:21, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

Hello Bennv123 and thanks for doing this review. I added the missing citations. The exact example about the person's height is not in the source but the examples there are very similar so I hope this shouldn't be a problem. Phlsph7 (talk) 13:47, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

Bennv123 (talk) 13:54, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

@Phlsph7 I think the claim "the decimal system in arithmetic was invented in India" seems a bit problematic. People were doing various kinds of positional decimal "arithmetic" for centuries before the Hindu–Arabic numeral system per se, in multiple other parts of the world. There are various more precise statements that would be accurate but perhaps too wordy for a DYK hook. –jacobolus (t) 19:51, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

@Jacobolus: Thanks for raising this concern. From Burgin 2022, p. 13: "the main contribution of Indian mathematics to the human culture is the decimal positional numeral system ... It is India that gave us the ingenius method of expression all numbers by means of ten symbols ...". Based on the sources that I'm aware of, this claim is common. Strictly speaking, the statement that it was invented in India does not exclude the possibility that it was invented elsewhere as well. But if this is an issue, we could use the hook "... that the decimal system common in arithmetic was invented in India?". This would leave even more space for not-so-common decimal systems. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:17, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

@Phlsph7: Alternatively, ALT1 can just be struck through. ALT0 and ALT2 strike me as more interesting hooks anyway. Bennv123 (talk) 08:41, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Agreed, ALT0 and ALT2 are the better options so not much is lost by removing ALT1. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:45, 22 March 2024 (UTC)