The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was Nomination withdrawn. It's always nice when an AfD regular happens to be a subject matter expert. Xymmax ^{So let it be written} _{So let it be done} 15:15, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Brian Bowditch[edit]

Brian Bowditch (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (delete) – (View log)

Non-notable professor of mathematics of unknown notability. Article says 'known for his contributions to geometry and topology but no examples of notable contributions are provided. As written, does not appear to satisfy any of the criteria in WP:PROF. (Google pulls up his bio and little else.) Regents Park (sniff out my socks) 01:52, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

keep- I think sometimes people don't realise what 'professor' means in the UK. It means he was/is a head of department at a university, at least in his previous post. He has plenty of mentions in scholarly papers [1] and some credits in books [2]. He has proven some sort of theorem or something. Maths isn't 'trendy' so might not get in the papers etc but is still an encyclopedic subject, if anything even more so. Sticky Parkin 02:22, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I must admit a bit of ambivalence here myself. In general, we don't include (or don't seem to include) professors unless they have some particular theory or finding attributed to them that is notable. Counting the number of papers is not a great help since the lay editor cannot judge the quality of the journals in which they are published. There are many an academic with a long list of publications in second and third level journals who would appear notable by the standard of publication count. The same applies to credits in books. Since we, as lay editors, are not in a position to judge the quality of the work, we tend to rely on either an independent description of the notability of the work or, with some luck, professional awards that are notable. In this case, we don't seem to have either. Anyway, I'm curious to see what the rest of the wikiworld thinks and would particularly like to see what standards we should apply in the case of university professors. (Note: Here, in the US, a department chair, as in head of department, means little.) --Regents Park (sniff out my socks) 02:36, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Point of information only: In the UK, the title of professor does not imply the person is (or ever was) head of a university department. As discussed at Professor#Most other English-speaking countries, there's some inconsistency in academic titles even within the UK at present. There are over 30 professors in the Warwick math dept—see their staff list. It is one of the top maths depts in the UK though (certainly top 5 i'd say). Qwfp (talk) 08:10, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Additional: In most UK universities, the single rank or title of Professor equates to full, or possibly named, professor in the US. It happens that one or two, including Warwick, have gone to the "three-tier" model. At some universities it is or was true that only a professor would be a head of department, usually regarded as a rather more senior position than it is in the US. Richard Pinch (talk) 11:10, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep - per above user. -Marcusmax(speak) 02:26, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:59, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delete the way it is now. Professors I have no problem with, as long as they've done something--but that 'something' needs some cold hard evidence, and this article does not provide any. He is 'known' for things: known by whom? Not by anyone that I can establish, and the author's burden is to prove that he is in fact known. And RegentsPark, we are not actually given any of the work, so we couldn't possibly judge it. Was this written by one of his students? Drmies (talk) 04:04, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete as it stands now. Does not establish notability. Being a UK professor is not enough to establish notability per WP:PROF. --Salix (talk): 06:28, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep article has improved just about enough. --Salix (talk): 13:38, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: Not only fails to establish notability, but fails to mention anything of interest. Why was this article created in the first place? -- Dominus (talk) 06:50, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  Keep. This is the guy who solved the Angel problem? Geez, why doesn't it say so? -- Dominus (talk) 13:04, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. Brian Bowditch is actually a very well-known figure in geometric group theory and hyperbolic geometry. He has papers in Inventiones and JAMS, but he has other papers that are cited more, like the one in Duke with over 100 citations on Google Scholar. Warwick is a fairly strong math department, and his professorship is an indication of his status. But his work stands for itself. Recently, he proved the angel problem, which while from the viewpoint of his entire corpus of work is not that significant, it is a pretty famous problem and notable achievement in its own right. --C S (talk) 07:00, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. I can't find evidence he satisfies any of the criteria of WP:TEACH. The only one he might meet at present would seem to be criterion 1, namely "the person's research has made significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources". This is certainly not demonstrated in the article at present and the ((notability)) template has been in place since June, which seems enough notice to do something about it. MathSciNet reports that "Brian H. Bowditch is cited 484 times by 270 authors" (subscription req'd), topped by 53 for the 1995 paper in Duke Mathematical Journal to which C S refers above (see Wikipedia:TEACH#Notes and Examples for reasons to prefer this count to Google Scholar's). Based on MathSciNet's citation counts, his h-index is 13 (13 papers cited at least 13 times each) and his g-index is 20 (top 20 papers have been cited an average of 20 times each), which seems respectable for a maths professor aged 46 or 47 rather than outstanding. His proof of the angel problem is covered in that article, and while it's certainly worth including there, and I don't think that proof alone makes him notable (the angel problem is hardly the Riemann hypothesis after all). Qwfp (talk) 09:43, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep on the basis of the citation record, which is relatively high for mathematics, certainly more than the average. The importance of a scholar is judged by that. That is the key way in which other scholars in the field show the notability, and we just mention it. I find it incomprehensible that after finding this record, the person who found it said it didn't matter. Full professor at a major university is normally notable- -even if not head of dept. That too shows the opinion of colleagues about the notability, and it is they who judge. One does not have to do work like solving the Riemann problem to be notable. Notability does not require fame, or we;'d be a very small encyclopedia. But I hope someone who knows enough to do it properly will quickly upgrade the article. DGG (talk) 11:33, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep. I am on a wikibreak and travelling at the moment and will not have time to work on the article for a few days (I did not know that the article was created until I saw this AfD). I am a geometric group theorist myself (look at the WP articles I had written listed on my userpage) and I know Bowditch's work personally quite well. He is in fact a notable mathematician both in geometric group theory and in geometric topology. The articles Geometric group theory and Bass-Serre theory already mention, by name, some of his important contributions: the JSJ-decomposition theory for word-hyperbolic groups, his work on boundaries of hyperbolic groups, and his work on relative hyperbolicity. In geometric topology he is also a prominent name, particularly for his work on the curve complex, the study of the Teichmuller space and applications to 3-manifolds, Kleinian groups and mapping class groups. The high citability results, in GoogleScholar[3], and MathSciNet, demonstrate this convincingly. Let me also mention that a substantial number of his papers have been published in the toughest and most prestigious math journals, such as Inventiones Mathematicae, Acta Mathematica, Journal of the American Mathematical Society, Crelle's Journal, Duke Mathematical Journal, and others. The article certainly needs improvement and expansion, and when I get back from the break I will do that, but it does deserve a keep. Nsk92 (talk) 12:07, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Another note: Bowditch had given an invited address at the 2004 European Congress of Mathematicians[4], also a significant sign of distinction. Nsk92 (talk) 12:21, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yet another note: Bowditch has been awarded[5] the Whitehead Prize in 1997 by the London Mathematical Society (technically, a "Junior Whitehead Prize", which means for someone at most 15 years after PhD, but nevertheless a notable award). Here is a quote for a detailed award citation that was published in the Bulletin of LMS[6]:"His deepest work is on the asymptotic properties of word-hyperbolic groups. This work simultaneously generalises and simplifies recent work of several authors, and it already has many applications. In one application, he develops a new theory of groups acting on dendrites. Building on previous contributions of G. Levitt, G. A. Swarup and others, this led him to a solution of the `cut-point conjecture'. This recent work also yields a characterisation of word-hyperbolic groups as convergence groups. Bowditch has solved several major problems in geometric group theory using methods that are elegant and as elementary as they can be." Nsk92 (talk) 12:52, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep. I think the award and the other less extraordinary, but still non-trivial, notability claims are sufficient to meet WP:PROF, which is a pretty stringent standard (compared with, say, WP:ATHLETE). VG ☎ 13:21, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - The invited ECM address makes it easy. Richard Pinch (talk) 13:51, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep - (Changed from nom.) Seems notable enough now, with the independent prize and the solution to a specific problem. Clearly, the deletion process works! --Regents Park (sniff out my socks) 13:56, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• OK, Keep--the article has improved, though it still needs editorial work, and if the guy is as great as Nsk argues, then those references need to be part of the article, not just of the AfD discussion. Good work, RegentsPark. Drmies (talk) 14:15, 15 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.