# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged tagging

23

Resolved. collatz renamed to collatz-conjecture. Proposal: Rename collatz to collatz-conjecture. Although Lothar Collatz is most known for the $3x+1$ problem (the Collatz Conjecture), I don’t think their names should be used interchangeably. Furthermore, the latter tag has a more informative name. I posted this in the last Tag Management, but I only got ...

18

The proposal was fine. By now a moderator changed the tag. Also note that there was one positive review too. (It was declined 2 vs 1.) It's hard to know what exactly happened. Maybe the reviewers disagreed that changing the tag is relevant enough for an edit (in my opinion, it is, at least in clear cases like this). Or maybe they did not realize that ...

17

We should keep these problems, because you never know when you have one. Some days ago, user Nikita asked the question Is this contrived sequence eventually periodic?. Innocently enough, they explained that they had built quite a weird sequence $A(n)$, which seemed to have a period, as all residue classes mod $6$ except for one gave the exact same thing. I ...

15

I have no strong feelings about whether there should be a separate tag about the number 'e'. (It was convenient way back when, when most of the questions tagged 'e' is about the function $e^x$.) I do think that the names can be confusing, whenever something has to do with Euler. Maybe, if we want to rename: For the number '$e$', name the tag 'eulers-...

13

Proposal: Create the tag eulerian-numbers. The Eulerian number $A(n,k)$ is the number of permutations in $S_n$ with exactly $k$ descents, and it is an important combinatorial object. Searching for "Eulerian numbers" is:q returns around 30 legitimate hits, which is a worthwhile number of questions to have a tag attached, in my opinion. I had also raised ...

12

In my opinion, yes. Because there are related approaches (the comparison test) to convergence of integrals and convergence of series, besides the existence of the integral test for series.

10

Resolved: The tag synonym was created. I suggest a synonym dg-algebras $\to$ differential-graded-algebras. The tag (dg-algebras) was created in July 2017 (shortly before allowed length of tag names was increased). A short tag-excerpt was also created at the time. The tag (differential-graded-algebras) was created recently (July 2019). It seems clear that ...

10

Proposal: Remove gre-exam, gmat-exam. These are meta tags with very bare-bones tag wikis. Furthermore, there aren’t any other tags for important math exams, i.e. the IMO or USAMO, so why should we make an exception for these two?

10

Proposal: Create a tag umbral-calculus. In this question the asker asks why there is no tag for questions related to the umbral calculus. I am in agreement with Alexander Gruber's comment that the significant number of otherwise unorganized questions on the topic is a good indication that the tag is needed. Proposed Tag Excerpt: Umbral calculus refers ...

10

There is no very deep reason. In the post you linked to a list of very short tags was highlighted. I then went through the list and decided what to do, commenting: I did something about all proposals. I am not sure I chose the best option each time but it's easy to change. Feel free to comment obviously. Maybe it's best to take the changed version as a ...

9

I agree that these tags are not needed. For the former I suggest to retag the two questions (the tag then goes automatically away after a day). For the latter we might wait for a few days if the question "survives" or not. If the questions should be deleted the tag would be gone too. For tags that only have a few questions to them, retagging is usually ...

9

Technically it was not a change of the name. What happened is that I recently switched the direction of the synonym between pde and partial-differential-equations. It used to be the case that a questions to be tagged partial-differential-equations was automatically retagged as pde. Now it is the other way round. As Martin mentioned that's discussed at ...

8

Proposal: Eliminate the tag transformation. The tag transformation is too broad—there are a large number of things in mathematics called "transformations" coming from diverse parts of mathematics, and tagging a question with this tag does nothing to refine or sort these different notions. I would like to see this tag dead and buried. I have spent ...

7

Computer searches are a part of modern mathematics. It is natural for people to ask about them. Much of math research is about finding patterns and making conjectures. In addition, some of the questions in the OP could be solved without computer searches, for example Consecutive sequences of not cube-free numbers which could be solved nicely with the ...

7

Proposal: make smooth-manifolds a synonym of manifolds. In theory, there is a distinction between these tags, with smooth-manifolds referring to just differentiable manifolds and manifolds also including topological manifolds. In practice, the distinction does not matter for many questions and manifolds alone is very frequently used for questions that are ...

7

Proposal: Remove the new tag algebraic-proofs. I think it is easily abused and not particularly useful (doesn't convey any interesting information to answerers).

7

Proposal: eliminate the tag expression-simplification The tag expression-simplification has 150 questions under it. As a rather vague tag, it has seen a spike of usage in the past few months (I have already removed it from the 20 most recent questions). Leaving it untouched will only confuse more newbies about which tag suits the question best.

6

Let me preface this by saying that there is a thick borderline between set-theory and elementary-set-theory where things are not very clear cut, and at the end of the day require set theorists to actively clean up the tag choices. (Because ultimately the set-theory tag is aimed to focus on what set theorists would consider set theory, rather than elementary ...

6

Using Data Explorer (SEDE) you can check how has the number of questions in some given tag evolved over time. Here are two queries, one showing absolute number of questions in the elementary-set-theory, the other one showing percentage of all question which have this tag. The latter is taken from here: A statistical question about statistical questions. ...

6

Proposal: Eliminate the discontinuous-functions tag. It seems clear that the continuity tag is enough for questions about discontinuous functions.

6

There is an obvious connection between $e$ and the exponential function $e^x$ (in the strict sense - could also be $a^x$). But the one is a number, important enough to deserve specific study, and the other a function. There must be a substantial corpus on both topics. I would vote for a tag "$e$", separate from "exponential-function", having the synonym "...

6

A general advice on choice of tags: How am I supposed to use tags? I will repeat one advice given there - during and after posting the question you're shown several lists of similar questions. You could check some of those post, maybe looking at the tag used on other related posts will help you to find some other suitable tag. You could also try asking in ...

5

Some comments: Algebraic geometry is related to abstract algebra, just as differential geometry is related to calculus. You want to add a tag to attract people interested in algebraic geometry, can the "abstract algebra" tag work? Is there any user who (i) is interested in AG, but (ii) watches ONLY the "abstract algebra" tag but not the AG tag? The ...

5

My understanding is that most of the time, someone who asks a question on an elementary topic will not be able to name precisely what the relevant tags are. In such cases, it's all up to more senior users to tidy things up. But then not all questions get re-tagged properly because there are too many of them, because not everyone thinks of taking care of ...

5

Proposal : create grothendieck-group to differentiate from grothendieck-construction. The tag grothendieck-construction currently has 18 questions, 12 of which are about the Grothendieck group rather than the Grothendieck construction (there is no tag-wiki). A search for "Grothendieck construction" (without the quotation marks) returns 70 questions, and ...

5

Following an earlier discussion I approved a synonym elementary-probability to probability. Likely down the road a merge will happen. The main reasons are: we do not separate tags by level, and in this case there even is probability-theory that is an "advanced" tag so that further separation seems not useful. the community did over the past two years ...

5

Proposal: Add the tag grad-curl-div; make gradient, curl and divergence aliases thereof. Edit 2: I've revised the proposal statement to Alexander Gruber's (in my view superior) suggestion in the comments. Implementing this proposal poses some advantages over the status quo: It would (productively) free the > 6k questions about the gradient from the ...

5

Proposal: I suggest to create a synonym between matrix-groups and linear-groups. (I am not really sure which direction is better.) The tag linear-groups has been on the site for some time, you can see that the tag-excerpt and the tag-wiki have been created in 2013. The tag matrix-group has been created recently (July 2019). As far as I can tell, the two ...

5

Proposal: Merge gaussian and normal-distribution. I'm no statistician, but I don't see the value in having both tags. Looking at the questions under gaussian, there doesn't seem to be anything that doesn't fall under the tag normal-distribution.

5

Proposal: Make division-ring a synonym of division-algebras. I don't think there is much difference. We can argue whether a division algebra is always associative or not. I wrote the tag wiki with octonions in mind, and phrased it "inclusively". A division-ring is surely always associative, but does that warrant having two tags? I think not. ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible