tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Tags: distribution and distributions)

WillieWong comments on "Tags: distribution and distributions" (8569)

2010-08-23T14:49:21-07:00

yeah, I was a bit torn between 'schwartz-distributions' and 'generalized-functions'. As there is a character limit on tags, this is one case where tag aliasing can be really useful.

I figured in the end that if people want to create/use 'generalized-functions', they are free to do so. My goal was only to sort out the mess that was 'distributions'. So I created 'schwartz-distributions' to try to prevent future confusions.

ex-falso-quodlibet comments on "Tags: distribution and distributions" (8565)

2010-08-23T14:32:26-07:00

I had created a tag "generalized-functions" for this same reason mentioned in the original post, so one could now (re)tag threads appropriately.

WillieWong comments on "Tags: distribution and distributions" (8557)

2010-08-23T08:31:38-07:00

For a lack of better/short name, I will re-tag the ones as subsets of the tangent bundle tangent-distributions for the time being. Please raise an objection and give a better name if you have one. (distributions-in-tangent-bundle is too long and will be truncated by software)

WillieWong comments on "Tags: distribution and distributions" (8556)

2010-08-23T08:21:09-07:00

@Anton: the second point that I made in my initial post has not been addressed. So I'm going to re-tag some of the obviously NON-probability distributions. I apologize in advance for the bumps I will cause to those problems.

I will re-tag the distributions in the sense of analysis as schwartz-distributions.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Tags: distribution and distributions" (8545)

2010-08-22T17:13:58-07:00

I've renamed them [probability-distributions]. The merge is irreversible, but it's easy to rename it back to [distributions] if somebody has a good reason for doing so.

It's true that anybody with sufficient rep can recreate a bad tag, but most people try to use popular existing tags whenever possible.

WillieWong comments on "Tags: distribution and distributions" (8544)

2010-08-22T07:10:06-07:00

The suggestion should work. If I type "top" into the tag field, 'at.algebraic-topology' and 'gt.geometric-topology' both come up, as well as 'homotopy-theory' and 'polytopes', so I think it matches any part of the word.

Andrew Stacey comments on "Tags: distribution and distributions" (8543)

2010-08-22T06:14:26-07:00

One difficulty with just killing them is that anyone with sufficient rep can simply recreate them. If 'probability-distribution' exists and one starts typing 'distribution' in to the tag field, does 'probability-distribution' get suggested? If not, it might be better to have 'distribution-probability' since that will definitely get suggested, even though it's a bit awkward.

Harry Gindi comments on "Tags: distribution and distributions" (8520)

2010-08-21T16:36:40-07:00

I agree with Willie. They add no information.

WillieWong comments on "Tags: distribution and distributions" (8515)

2010-08-21T16:21:36-07:00

@Mark: I am also in favour of just killing the tags period. I suppose one might argue that it has some virtue if used in conjunction with other tags, so nothing may need to be done about splitting up the tags.

But at the very least I think distribution and distributions should be merged.

Mark Meckes comments on "Tags: distribution and distributions" (8512)

2010-08-21T15:58:19-07:00

WillieWong comments on "Tags: distribution and distributions" (8511)

2010-08-21T15:45:09-07:00

Firstly, one might think that the two tags ought to be merged into distributions, following our informal policy of preferring the plural form of nouns.

Secondly, however, I feel that those tags are bad, bad tags because distribution is such an overloaded word in mathematics. Under distributions we find questions about probability distributions as well as generalized functions. Under distribution we also find questions about geometrical distributions (in the sense of subsets of the tangent bundle of a manifold). This is likely to lead to much confusion.

Luckily, so far only 12 questions total are using those tags. Presumeably we can clean this up by hand with not too much trouble. But I am not sure how we should do this. One idea I have is to split into three tags probability-distributions, geometrical-distributions (I'm not so sure about the name of this one, a better suggestion?), and distributions-and-generalized-functions (which can be merged from the generalized-functions tag). Any comments?