Talk:Mathematics of radio-frequency engineering

Suspiciously weak article

The references for this article are all from archive.org whereas one might expect some at least to refer to IEEE publications. Apart from the lede, which has been tagged, this article appears suspiciously weak. I corrected false assertions in one section, but other sections also seem dubious. The pattern is first to use links to existing articles, then to finish a section with vaguely related archive.org citation. The promise to tie the article together with complex analysis, given in the lede, is not accomplished. The article challenges our project as we scrub misinformation. I found the article by using "What links here" from one of its links. The article appears to be a test of discriminatory power of readers.Rgdboer (talk) 20:25, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

The article really boggles me. Seems very weak (see Rgdboer above - and especially, the tag hit the nail - unencylopaedic) in areas. Yet very original (yes, bold and ambitious) in outlook; and very eclectic, indeed it's all TOO original (more on all this in a future post). I wonder if the creator is self-taught? Either way if this article is kept, some SERIOUS editing is gonna be needed. At the ready??!!... Ema--or (talk) 04:00, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Here's my promised evaluation of the article. The intro needs rewriting; still informative though (see discussion about Gauss/Argand plane). Section 4 (Maxwell's equations): Relevant topic but needs complete overhaul. Section 5(Path integrals apart from #5.2) is irrelevant and needs to go. Maybe #5.2 could be made the new lead for that section. #6 Rgdboer basically said it. #7.2(Fourier, Laplace, Z, Bessel, etc) started on the right track but lost me when it went from talking about integral transforms to their application in general relativity. #7.5(Dual categories) sounds like pure mathematics to me. #8.4 Dodgy(or not?) claim about neural networks; not sure it belongs in this topic. The joke about the topologist in note 13 is not really suitable in context. Now, if this article was a meant as wiki-joke, then it is one of a rather sophisticated variety. It also seems this is not the first time the creator has done this. I think this needs to focus more on relevant maths techniques needed for RF and microwave engineering, mainly (complex analysis and vector calculus). Nonetheless, a lot of the material could recycle for other articles, especially for pure mathematics(or expositions thereof, once they have been checked) and mathematical physics(#4 in particular). That's me! Ema--or (talk) 18:11, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Considering deletion of this article

Since the previous section was written, there have been some changes in the first 20% of the article, but apart from sporadic minor changes, none in the remaining 80%. None of Ema--or's diligently collected changes have been attempted.

The article is still atrocious. It rambles about the history for two sections without introducing any mathematical concept, other than unexplained name-dropping the terms time domain, delta function, Fourier transform and frequency domain. It then goes on to talk about the difficulties radio hobbyists face, without any mention of mathematics.

The next mathematical topic gets introduced in a section called "Sidebands analysis", a term which, b.t.w. never is explained. The topic are complex numbers; a worthwhile topic, one should think; one that often is fleshed out with the concept of complex impedance. But all our article says about complex numbers is the ludicrous assertion that "They exist because the most general expression for a cosine wave is really [the weighted sum of the exponential function]"; there isn't even a link to any of our pertinent mathematical articles; only to the rare term "cosine wave" (redirecting to sine wave), not even to cosine or complex number. It does mention the superposition principle, but only as an afterthought, missing the chance to build up the explanation from the easiest, most fundamental and mathematically most satisfying property of electromagnetic waves. Later, it talks about multiplying cosine waves without mentioning what that has to do with reality, namely, amplitude modulation. Moreover, given that the Fourier transform was introduced earlier, it would have been more expedient to explain the sidebands in the frequency domain. The rest of that section again talks about difficulties radio hobbyists face without any connection to mathematics, other than a garrulous description of a division.

With that, we reach the end of the portion that experienced any non-minor changes since the problems have been pointed out. I read a little further into the remainder, but it doesn't look any better. The next section talks mostly about how to build RLC filters, of course without linking to our article about them, and again lackadaisically and randomly introducing some mathematical terms without connecting them to each other or to the terms already introduced before. Again, basic mathematical concepts such as complex plane and matrix are used without even linking to our articles. The text vacillates between truisms and gibberish, as in the sentence "One may also imagine these starting conditions as a matrix of frequencies what??. [...] One could have an oscilloscope that makes graphs with an off-diagonal version of the domain [what?] just like this one [no antecedent!], and it would still be correct – as long as one did the computations carefully.".

At that point, I gave up reading any further. Ema--or already analyzed the whole article, and nobody seemed to care. Ema--or questioned whether the article should be kept, and time has since answered that question. This article is hopeless; all that remains to do is propose deletion, and I will do so in due time. — Sebastian 03:53, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

I went ahead and proposed the article for deletion. There was also a template complaining that it was written like a manual or guidebook, which I removed since it gave the wrong impression, sitting right under the proposed deletion template, that that was the major concern, and since it appears to me less actionable than the concerns raised here on the talk page. — Sebastian 01:47, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

It looks like User:Sitar Physics dumped everything he knew into a big essay, and then left in 2011. Could userfy it, but who cares? Dicklyon (talk) 08:29, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

The article was de-PRODed, but significant concerns about WP:OR, WP:SYNTH and general comprehensibility remained. (I mean, do radio engineers really care about SO(10) grand unified theory?!) So, as I did with p-adic quantum mechanics the other day, I drastically cut it down. I hope nobody is too upset by this, but it honestly seemed a better way to go than trying to make the old article useful by incremental modifications. XOR'easter (talk) 18:53, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

Whoo-hooh-hoo! YaaaaaaY! Well done, and thanks for cleaning up the article, as well as the recognition of the concerns I raised (5 yrs ago - it's never too late, I suppose, according to this wiki policy); I thought it might never happen... Ema--or (talk) 01:32, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

Old proposed deletion

The above WP:template signifies the recent proposed deletion. As it stands today, the article is a WP:stub. — Rgdboer (talk) 02:38, 28 December 2017 (UTC)