Chapter 7 Tom Brown's Wikipage
Project by: Pranjal Keshari, Jimmy Mei, Sebastian Mora, and Kyle Singh.
\(\textbf{Summary:}\) Our team has decided to create a Wikipedia page about a notable Ramsey theorist for our semester project.
More specifically, we have chosen Professor Thomas Brown of SFU.
On Professor Brown's page, he says, “I am mostly interested in questions related to van der Waerden's theorem on arithmetic progressions,” which states that “for each \(k\text{,}\) there exists a (smallest) \(n = n(k)\) such that whenever \([1, 2, \ldots , n]\) is partitioned into two parts, in any way whatsoever, then at least one of these parts must contain a \(k\)-term arithmetic progression.”
Professor Brown is a known Ramsey theorist. In fact, in analyzing the papers he has worked on, we found that he has an Erdős number of 1 (meaning he has collaborated directly with Paul Erdős himself, specifically on the papers “Quasi-Progressions and Descending Waves” and “Quantitative Forms of a Theorem of Hilbert”).
We have learned a few things throughout working on this project.
We came to realize that for this project, effective communication is essential in doing this. We all have ideas and deadlines we want to meet, as well as varying schedules. So, communication of these things has been key in progressing.
We have also learned that this will be a project we need to get ahead of quickly.
We came to learn recently that in creating a Wikipedia page, the page must be done all at once, and not at various times like we once thought; therefore, we needed to have all our sections done before actually creating the page. In addition, the page needed to be done and submitted fairly quickly due to Wikipedia's evaluation process.
As we have now learned, after the submission of the page, the page was reviewed by a group of Wikipedia editors. Luckily, this process was completed much faster than we expected and Professor Brown's page was published before our class ended .
