Talk:Symbolic method (combinatorics)

Obscure and incomprehensible article

This article is an incomprehensible account of one specialized theory of combinatorial enumeration due to Flajolet et al. It is completely opaque to the uninitiated reader. I propose it be deleted or rewritten from the ground up.

I plan to merge into this article the so-called "Fundamental theorem of combinatorial enumeration" and let anyone who cares to do so take care of the rewriting. Zaslav (talk) 02:21, 28 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Merge done. Changed link "Fundamental theorem of combinatorial enumeration" due to merge. Zaslav (talk) 21:57, 25 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Classes (or species) are not easy to present. When vulgarizing, the material looks like some tricks that old grandpa shows us. When trying to build a rigorous language to write the classes (or species) equations, the material goes rapidly the other way, starting looking like a hard logical-semantical theory or extremely abstract algebra.

Asking initiated people their opinion on this stuff, I never heard the same answer

nuclear math
under-arithmetics
combinatorial logic
patterns
containers
cabal of egf-ology and so on.

The species belong to math like the synthetic geometry does. When Euclid says that line glide along itself, this stuff says : It is necessary to fix only one point to block all. The article is about very simple facts that are really hard to rigorously describe. The classes (or species) will always represent a linguistic challenge.Nicolae-boicu (talk) 19:56, 11 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Objections from former talk page of "Fundamental theorem of combinatorial enumeration"

The following is the talk page of "Fundamental theorem of combinatorial enumeration", moved here when that article was moved into "Symbolic combinatorics". Zaslav (talk) 21:19, 25 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Article is obscure and should be deleted

This article is an unintentional work of obfuscation. The name "fundamental theorem of combinatorial enumeration" is not standard and it could refer to any number of things. Google reveals very few uses of the phrase "fundamental theorem of combinatorial enumeration", and most of the hits that it does have are derived from Wikipedia itself. The phrase is pretentious. The theorem here is a cumbersome and highly formal generalization of some good ideas in combinatorics. It is an unworkable idea for enumerative combinatorics to have a "fundamental theorem"; it is like having a universal solvent in chemistry. While the theorem here has some merit, the entire article should simply be folded into the article on symbolic combinatorics. Greg Kuperberg (talk) 17:29, 26 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Kuperberg, except that I don't know whether or not the article merits merging into another article. All his objections are valid. There is no such thing in enumerative combinatorics as an acknowledged "fundamental theorem". I also found the article to be extraordinarily technical, overspecialized, and obscure. Zaslav (talk) 02:14, 28 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Merger proposal

{{mergefrom|Stirling numbers and exponential generating functions|discuss=Talk:Symbolic combinatorics#Merger proposal|date=December 2011}}

Wrong title

The article appears to be about "symbolic combinatorics", not analytic combinatorics in general. How did it get the new name? Zaslav (talk) 06:42, 24 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The title of Flajolet and Sedgewick's book is "Analytic Combinatorics". The name of their annual conference (now run primarily by Sedgewick) is "Analytic Algorithmics and Combinatorics (ANALCO)". Do you have a source for your assertion that they are using the wrong name for the thing that they do? If they call it "analytic combinatorics" and others call some other notable topic "analytic combinatorics", then the proper Wikipedia solution is to have two articles on the different subjects, with disambiguators in the title and with hatnotes or a disambiguation page, it is not to make up a new name for one of the two subjects or to change its article to be instead about the other one. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:40, 24 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]