Talk:Jean-François Mertens

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Concerns (late July 2012)[edit]

This page is exagerate. It is almost twice as long as the page of Andrew Wiles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wiles who proved Fermat's last theorem. Many prominent and respectable scientists have much soberer and shorter pages.

I understand the need of friends and students to present somebody who just passed away in the best possible light ( and this is certainly is a good occasion to promote their own research...), but the two papers quoted at the beginning ( Mertens, Jean-François, 1992. "Essential Maps and Manifolds," Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 115(2), 1992. and ^Mertens, Jean-François, 2003. "Localization of the Degree on Lower-dimensional Sets," International Journal of Game Theory, 32: 379-386.) are rather minor contributions, at the level of a master paper.

As for the rest of the work: it is in a subfield of decision and game theory, a subject that is usually considered peripheral and not very deep. To inflate it in this way is not honest.

I am confident every *serious* mathematician would share my view. —unsigned comments by various IPs

We go by what independent reliable sources say. In particular, I agree with removing the tendentious and unsourced opinions contributions ... are rather straightforward and relevance is controversial. Deltahedron (talk) 17:41, 17 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose "independent and reliable" means, in this case,somebody who teaches mathematics and topology in a top department. The opinion in unsourced because no serious mathematician have ever paid attention to the kind of "research" mentioned in the wiki article. The only work of any relevance is the one in probability quoted at the beginning, the articles on topology are at the level of a master paper and the rest, discussed in the body of the wiki article, is essentially self referential. Again I strongly suggest to contact an *actual* and *active* mathematician (say at Princeton, Harvard, Mit, Cambridge..)and begging an opinion, or just asking if (s)he ever heard of the man and his theorems. The article has been written by Mertens' studends: these are individuals teaching mathematics in school of economics or game theorists and are, in general, not mathematicians, nor where they able to get a job in serious mathematical institutes. An internet search can easily confirm this. In my opinion devoting such an exagerate space to a minor figure is not in agreement with wikipedia purposes and could only impair its reputation. I don't have further to say and I will not write again. I saw that controversial articles in wikipedia have a banner at the beginning stating it, this should done in this case too, with refence to this talk section.

The nature of "reliable sources" is explained at length at Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources and why they are needed and how they are used at Wikipedia:Verifiability. You would not expect to see the personal opinions of anonymous contributors included in an encyclopaedia. If there is a documented controversy over this person's work, then by all means supply a reference for it. Deltahedron (talk) 20:19, 17 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Published or unpublished?[edit]

I reverted the addition of the word "unpublished" to describe reference [7], 1994 survey paper, which was published as a university research report. I do not know whether, as the edit summary [1] said "the wok found no publisher", or whether it has ever been published in any other way. No doubt if it was important to describe the fate of this particular work, there would be a reliable source to tell us what it was. However, there is no doubt that it was published, and is an adequate reference to support the assertion made in the article, namely that it exists and describes a particular aspect of Mertens's work.

There appears to be a concerted effort by one or more people using IP addresses such as 91.113.59.212 (talk · contribs · WHOIS), 91.115.49.149 (talk · contribs · WHOIS), 178.190.59.49 (talk · contribs · WHOIS), to add negative comments to this article. They all geolocate to the same city and so presumably are the same person or group. I would encourage those user(s) to create an account to facilitate discussion. Deltahedron (talk) 17:07, 18 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hallo, I already wrote all I had to say on this article: it is exagerate and acritical. It is useless to continue the discussion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.166.43.41 (talk) 15:00, 14 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Possible[edit]

An obituary is http://theoryclass.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/jean-francois-mertens-1946-2012/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by BlackWhiteSea-snake (talk • contribs) 11:29, 19 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is already in reference 1, actually. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.66.95.183 (talk) 10:57, 21 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Bottazzi[edit]

Jean-Marc Bottazzi is not identical with Mertens but was and is favourable to him.

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