Talk:De Bruijn's theorem

A fact from De Bruijn's theorem appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 2 September 2012 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Nicolas de Bruijn was inspired to prove De Bruijn's theorem on packing bricks into boxes by his seven-year-old son's inability to pack some bricks into a box without wasted space?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2012/September. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/De Bruijn's theorem.

Wikipedia

DYK nomination

Formatting inline math

I reduced the size of the inline math using \scriptstyle. I know it creates problems with some of the characters, but overall I think the article looks better. However, if you don't like it feel free to reverse it. Here is a comparison of some choices using different approaches:

(display LaTex) The second of de Bruijn's results concerns the case in which each side of the brick is a multiple of the next smaller side: there exists a sequence of numbers $c_{1},c_{2},\dots c_{d}$ such that $a_{1}=c_{1}$ , $a_{2}=c_{1}c_{2}$ , $a_{3}=c_{1}c_{2}c_{3}$ , and more generally $a_{i}=\prod _{j=1}^{i}c_{j}$ .
(scriptstyle LaTeX) The second of de Bruijn's results concerns the case in which each side of the brick is a multiple of the next smaller side: there exists a sequence of numbers $\scriptstyle c_{1},c_{2},\dots c_{d}$ such that $\scriptstyle a_{1}=c_{1}$ , $\scriptstyle a_{2}=c_{1}c_{2}$ , $\scriptstyle a_{3}=c_{1}c_{2}c_{3}$ , and more generally $\scriptstyle a_{i}=\prod _{j=1}^{i}c_{j}$ .
({{math}} template) The second of de Bruijn's results concerns the case in which each side of the brick is a multiple of the next smaller side: there exists a sequence of numbers $c 1, c 2, ... c d$ such that $a 1 = c 1$ , $a 2 = c 1 c 2$ , $a 3 = c 1 c 2 c 3$ , and more generally

a_{i}=\prod _{j=1}^{i}c_{j}.

I cheated and broke out the product symbol on a separate line because it's hard to implement with {{math}}. RockMagnetist (talk) 02:34, 30 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have mathjax turned on in my user preferences; apparently, from your examples, using \scriptstyle makes no difference there (perhaps it recognizes math in inline text and turns on scriptstyle automatically in that case?) However, using {{math}} looks significantly worse to me. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:52, 30 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I tried turning on mathjax and get a similar result. I think I tried mathjax some time ago and got some real messes; maybe it has since been improved. However, a lot of people won't have it turned on, so you might want to experiment with turning it off temporarily. If the LaTeX environment always looked better, I would happily abandon {{math}}. RockMagnetist (talk) 04:10, 30 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

When mathjax first became available, there was a severe bug that made it impossible to use ampersands or less than signs in math. That has since been fixed, though. Now the worst remaining problem I know about is some extra cruft it adds to the end of a {{citation}} or {{cite journal}} template if you try to use <math> within a title. Anyway, thanks for improving the default appearance. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:17, 30 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There are also examples where some symbols overlap each other (see equation 10 in Demagnetizing field). You're welcome. RockMagnetist (talk) 04:42, 30 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Name of theorem

Shouldn't it be de Bruijn's theorem? RockMagnetist (talk) 04:43, 30 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

My understanding of the Dutch name particles like "de" is that they are capitalized the same as most English words: lower case in the middle of a sentence, capitalized at the start of a sentence (or the start of an article's title). —David Eppstein (talk) 05:47, 30 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think that is probably right. I have corrected a couple in the middles of sentences. RockMagnetist (talk) 05:48, 30 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]