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Travis Willse
Travis Willse
5:35 AM
@MartinSleziak Thank you (yet) again for the info. I'm also pleased to see that convergence has been aliased to convergence-divergence.
 
Travis Willse
Travis Willse
5:48 AM
What would be the argument against making divergence a synonym of grad-curl-div (or whatever the order will be)? Not doing so would split divergence-related questions among the two tags, no?
 
Arctic Char
Arctic Char
6:00 AM
@TravisWillse The problem is that (as you spotted) divergence is (mis)used for convergence/divergence of sequences/series. The situation might be even worse if now those question will be tagged "grad-curl-div"
 
Travis Willse
Travis Willse
You mean the existing questions, or ones that would be tagged with divergence in the future?
 
Arctic Char
Arctic Char
@TravisWillse In mean in the future
Well, I dunno, might be the situation is not that bad? this returns only 161 questions.
 
Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
That's why I mentioned divergence-operator (or some of the other names mentioned in the linked post) as an option.
When somebody is adding a tag, if it's called divergence-operator (or divergence-vector-calculus or divergence-vector-field), they will probably realized that it is not about divergence of series/sequences/integrals.
 
Travis Willse
Travis Willse
The convergence was just today renamed to convergence-divergence, and attempting to add the "divergence" tag to a new question now suggests convergence-divergence as the first autocomplete option, which should make it more obvious that that is the tag the user desires than it was before. I would guess that change will reduce the incidence of incorrect application of divergence (irrespective of whether it is aliased to something else).
 
Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
By "aliased" you probably mean a tag synonym.
 
Travis Willse
Travis Willse
6:06 AM
Yes, exactly, I mean made a synonym of another tag.
 
Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
I meant renaming divergence to a different name. (So that the tag called divergence would no longer exist.)
 
Travis Willse
Travis Willse
In a way it might be better if convergence/divergence questions still incorrectly tagged with divergence appeared with grad-curl-div---it's wrong either way, but in the latter case the error would be more obvious and so more likely to be fixed.
Oh, I understand---
Yes, that would probably minimize mistaggings, and it would for the same reason make spotting (and thus removal) of incorrect uses of the tag more obvious.
 
Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
6:57 AM
I have asked in Math Mods' Office about renaming (divergence) to (divergence-operator): chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/20352/2019/12/7
 
 
11 hours later…
Aloizio Macedo
Aloizio Macedo
6:01 PM
About the div-grad-curl suggestion, it doesn't seem a very good idea to me. (I'll explain shortly.) However, it seems that I'm the only moderator that thinks so. If that is the case, I do not object to the implementation of the tag.
I'll essentially just repeat what I talked with the other moderators: responding to the points in Travis's post: https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/a/30915/59234, in order: 1) I don't think vector-analysis is broad as a tag. "gradient", on the other hand, would be broad. I am not sure what tagging as "gradient" would entice other than the question containing the gradient of something. For instance, the mathematical level is unclear, and the context can vary wildly.
Should someone talking about the gradient flow for their studies in Morse theory use that tag? The gradient of a function on a…
2) There are other ways to solve it. For example, just getting rid of curl and div.
3) I am not sure of the pedagogical value. It reads like a tag saying "This tag is about Chapter V of your Calculus X book." As a perhaps bad comparison but a first one that comes to mind, I don't think it would be useful to have a "determinant-trace-rank" tag or something similar.
4) That seems to be solved by just having the conv-div tag.
 
 
2 hours later…
Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
8:25 PM
Still, some clean-up of the tag will be needed - there are many questions in that tag which are about convergence/divergence of series. For example, the posts tagged divergence-operator+sequences-and-series.
 
 
1 hour later…
Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
9:45 PM
Since that post was edited a few times, let me add link to the current revision.
So I suppose that Aloizio Macedo's numbering corresponds to:
> 1. It would (productively) free the > 6k questions about the gradient from the rather broad tag vector-analysis.
> 2. It would resolve the weird asymmetry of the tagging situations of the three operators.
> 3. It would reflect the close pedagogical relationship of the three operators, as Alexander pointed out in the comments: In practice many questions about one operators at least implicitly involve one of the others.
> 4. It should in principle resolve the persistent problem of users erroneously using the divergence tag for questions about convergence and divergence in the analytic sense.
@AloizioMacedo Regarding 3, I get your point. But I still think that div, grad and curl are closer to each other than determinant, trace and rank.
@AloizioMacedo I do not think that it is always bad thing when some tag is related to topics in several areas. Combination with other tags can be used to restrict the set of questions to get the ones we're interested in. For example, (inequality) can appear in many areas, but I can add other tags to find inequalities in graph theory, ...
Another thing to keep in mind is that if there many questions which are related to all three of them (div, grad and curl), then this change would mean that we would use up only one spot instead of three. (A question can have at most five tags.)
 

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