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1:51 AM

new-tag A new tag rootfinding was created by Federico Poloni.

In mathematics and computing, a root-finding algorithm is an algorithm for finding roots of continuous functions. A root of a function f, from the real numbers to real numbers or from the complex numbers to the complex numbers, is a number x such that f(x) = 0. As, generally, the roots of a function cannot be computed exactly, nor expressed in closed form, root-finding algorithms provide approximations to roots, expressed either as floating point numbers or as small isolating intervals, or disks for complex roots (an interval or disk output being equivalent to an approximate output together...

@FedericoPoloni Just a comment that potentially useful to create also some tag-info for this tag. This might help other users to know better what the new tag is intended for. And also if a tag has only one question, it is automatically removed after some time unless it has a tag-wiki.

Sometimes (if the tag seems likely to be useful) I mentioned something like this in a comment. But since you were pingable in this room, I've mentioned it here.

And since you are rather experience with MO and also with other Stack Exchange sites, it is quite likely that I am just telling you things you already know.

3 hours later…

Martin Sleziak

4:40 AM

I meant to write: "that it is potentially useful" rather than "that it potentially useful".

I make many typos in chat - both in chat and in comments the typos are more difficult to correct if you don't spot them immediately. But I guess it was clear form the context what was meant.

3 hours later…

Federico Poloni

7:38 AM

Thanks for the heads-up! Do you personally think it would be a useful tag, and encourage me to create a tag wiki for it? Or maybe we should wait to see if the need for it arises in more questions?

It looks like it could be applied to more questions, e.g., mathoverflow.net/questions/41896/… mathoverflow.net/questions/257608/…, mathoverflow.net/questions/77442/…, mathoverflow.net/questions/22230/ab-ba-when-a-is-not-equal-to-b

Martin Sleziak

8:06 AM

I think that it might be useful tag, but probably people with good knowledge of numerical analysis are in better position to judge this.

So I would trust your judgement on this.

Aside from preventing the automatic removal (which is not an issue now), the advantage of having a tag-wiki is that the tag is less likely to be misused for purposes for which it was not originally intended.

It's possible that this is less likely to happen on MO. On Math.SE I could imagine that some user would use this tag, for example, for a question about finding roots of a quadratic equation.

For the benefit of others who might look here - the questions mentioned above are: Multi-variate secant method for solving $F(x)=0$, root solving without analytic derivative, Fast root finding for strictly decreasing function and a^b = b^a when a is not equal to b..

A general remark about new tags - when somebody thinks about creating new tag and they aren't really sure whether the tag is going to be useful, asking about this on meta seems like a reasonable thing to do.

This works at least to some extent on Mathematics - sometimes such post gets no feedback, but at least some discussions about tags has received attention from the community.

However, on MathOverflow the participation on meta is rather low in general and more specifically, it's rather rare to get some response to posts about tags.

You can look at Help improve tagging! (which contains some proposals for new tags) and in Help cleanup tags! (which is mostly about synonyms and removals). You can see that most of the posts there received no comments.

Here is also a comment from a moderator about the tag-related discussions:

Oct 16 '17 at 4:07, by François G. Dorais

In the early days of MO, there was a lot of tagging discussion which helped draw guidelines for what other tags might be useful and appropriate for the site. These days, however, only a handful of users are interested in tagging issues, probably since the system works well enough for everyone.

I see it a bit differently. I am not sure whether the tag-system on MO works well.

But it's possible that it has already reached the point that there's no hope to get it back to some reasonable state.

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