@Peter I know, right? It got pushed into the reopen queue because the poster edited with a "why is this post closed?" rant, and so people saw that and voted. I can't vote either.
I'm still confused though. It has happened before that people have just dropped questions, and others have found them interesting and picked it up and written an answer, then when the question is closed the answerer gets the option of "well, someone found it interesting, so I didn't feel the need to motivate" of course! But did the OP know a priori that someone was motivated? Whose responsibility is it to motivate?
Anyway , the whole "context rewrites" page is available, so I felt someone could have utilized that page.
Returning it as it was is not correct. If it gets closed now, I'll probably ask someone to do a context rewrite.
Whatever, but we shouldn't start shouting about EoQS being broken. There's been significant improvement. Remember that if there was an extreme earlier, the counter to it is not the other extreme. So we will have to be conscious of a middle path and also respect community verdicts on these issues.
@TeresaLisbon That's kind of makes my point - lets try and move away from "attempts" being the gold standard for context. Where the question comes from or what the student knows is more useful for answering and also for future readers (as this tells you the tools you can use, for example). Them giving an attempt helps us understand what the student knows, but is a rather odd way.
@user1729 True. Actually, I don't think that attempts are the gold standards for context : but I am of the belief that a correct and informed attempt is "enough" on its own for the question to stand. That is, if the person knows that a certain approach worked for a previous problem (not necessary to mention it in some cases), expects it to work here and obtains partial information , then I actually let such questions stand.
Such questions could avoid source, background etc. for me.
@lonestudent I have never seen a good argument against notification, so I find this quite irritating as well. Apparently some meta feature requests asking for this to be implemented have fallen on deaf ears.
@TeresaLisbon Thanks for your clarification. Let me, I want to ask you a little detail. As far as I understand the question cannot be deleted unless it gets -3 downvotes. (because sometimes I see: -1 downvote needed for deletion). How were the 3 upvoted questions deleted? (question isn't good/great, but I'm not asking this). I'm thinking, maybe it's because the questioner has a low reputation?
@lonestudent I think when closed questions aren't improved after some time, then regardless of the votes, the question is up for deletion. How many votes for deletion, depends upon the reputation of the question (most are usually only voted once or twice up, so in that case, 3 up votes).
Finally, let me please remind you all that stars in this room should be used to indicate material which people may want to refer back to in the future. Stars are not for indicating "like".
@Peter Well, the question is really a PSQ - all the writing does is say that the group is complete (but this is pretty much the definition of a finite complete group), and suggests $S_6$ as a possible counter-example, but with no reason as to why $S_6$ might be one.
I just recieved two notifications that two of my following posts have been closed hours ago. Usually when closure happens before logging in, the notification shows up immediately when I log in, but these two arrives one hour after the expected time. Has anyone else encountered this recently?
@vitamind We have no reliable sources anyway about what happened in this far past. Some historians claim that Pythagoras did not invent "$a^2+b^2=c^2$" as if they have witnessed this. And if this is the case, why do we call it "Pythagorean theorem" then ?
But it is pretty well understood that the Babylonians were familiar with the Pythagorean theorem.
Neugebauer has a brief discussion of this starting on page 36 of The exact sciences in antiquity.
And, contrary to your assertion, we actually do have good sources for Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek mathematics going back a few thousand years (there are papyri and cuneiform tablets which predate Euclid by two thousand years).
Evidence of Babylonian knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem comes from a cuneiform tablet in the Plimpton collection: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimpton_322
This tablet dates to around 1800 BCE, which predates Euclid by more than a thousand years.
