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 keep. -- Cirt (talk) 05:01, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Emil Hilb[edit]

Emil Hilb (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

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Appears to fail WP:Academic. I am unable to locate any reliable sources to establish notability at the level suggested by WP:Academic. ConcernedVancouverite (talk) 20:19, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Sorry to be a little rude, but you are obviously not a Mathematician - Emil Hilb contributed a lot of energy in the "Enzyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften", calling him not notable is hilarious. Mathsfreak (talk) 21:21, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment Mathsfreak, he may well be notable to you or other mathematicians, but notability for academics in Wikipedia follows these guidelines the WP:Academic guidelines and your article on him fails to demonstrate this. You need to back the claims of notability with sources that are recognized on Wikipedia as being reliable. We need enthusiastic editors like you on Wikipedia - but Wikipedia has developed rules and guidelines as to what is or is not a suitable Wikipedia article, and if you want your work to survive on Wikipedia, you do need to work within them (even if they do sometimes seem irrational). ConcernedVancouverite (talk) 22:46, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep - per his article on dewiki. Seems to be enough over there to establish his notability. Mato (talk) 21:27, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment I'm a mathematician (at least by training) and I've never heard of Hilb - but that's probably irrelevant, as I was mostly interested in logic and algebra. The German article, if translated rather than merely cited, doesn't seem particularly good but would go some way to establishing notability and mentions (though, by English Wikipedia standards, doesn't properly cite) at least one source I'd definitely regard as reliable - the Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung. However, what it mentions of his career, his definitely notable colleagues and his encyclopedia articles (unless they can be shown to have been cited in later mathematical research) seems to me to repeatedly fall just short of Wikipedia notability - though repeatedly enough to give a decent chance that other sources (probably several decades old and in German) would actually establish either WP:ACADEMIC or WP:GNG. There's nearly a week still to go on this AfD - I'd very much encourage Mathsfreak or other interested and knowledgeable editors to expand this article and look for further sources and facts for it. PWilkinson (talk) 23:11, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 00:27, 7 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 00:27, 7 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep Hilb held the chair for mathematics at Wurzburg until his death in 1929, being preferred over Ernst Zermelo for the position. Chairs at major German universities in the 1890-1935 era were extraordinarily difficult to attain (there usually being no more than one or two per university), easily being on par with endowed professorships and the like today. Internet sources are difficult to find that far back, but [1] this excerpt from Gbook's scan of Scripta Mathematica ought to be helpful in tracking down further sources. Ray^Talk 17:22, 7 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

From the source cited: "Apparently, Zermelo's teaching qualities had been questioned in spite of Hilbert's judgement that “Zermelo's lecture courses are always very successful”". Tijfo098 (talk) 14:18, 9 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• comment At first glance it's far to slim and neither the article nor references (an entry in a database and a passing mention in someone else's biography) indicate notability, but the German version suggests otherwise. Something really needs adding to this article though.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 02:00, 8 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep per Ray Yang. Sławomir Biały (talk) 13:07, 8 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment I've added a bit more information to the article on what he did professionally. I found the information here. I had not heard of Hilb before, but of course everybody's heard of Lindemann and Zermelo. Doing a Ph.D. thesis under the supervision of someone that everyone's heard of falls short of establishing notability; maybe getting a job that Zermelo couldn't get doesn't fully do that either, but it's something in the article that got my attention. Contributing the encyclopedia articles on trigonometric series and differential equations seems to be the principal occasion for notability, as far as I can tell so far. Michael Hardy (talk) 15:32, 8 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak keep. There's not a lot there, but what there is seems to be adequately sourced and to indicate that he was one of the respected mathematicians of his day. I think the article creator, Mathsfreak, would be well advised to focus more on quality than on quantity — he or she has been creating many short articles about mathematicians that need significant cleanup by others, and I think this is a good example of that pattern. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:32, 8 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Equivocation. Although WP:PROF seems hard to establish, he does get some WP:GNG-type coverage in German (stole these from the de.wiki):
  • Otto Haupt: Emil Hilb. In: Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung. Band 42, 1932, S. 183−198.
  • Siegfried Gottwald (Hrsg.): Lexikon bedeutender Mathematiker, Verlag Harri Deutsch, ISBN 3-323-00319-5, S. 203.
  • Hans-Joachim Vollrath: Emil Hilb. In: Peter Baumgart (Hrsg.): Lebensbilder bedeutender Würzburger Professoren. Degener, Neustadt/Aisch 1995, S. 320−338.

As you can see it's mostly obits from his day and modern historians of German mathematics that pay attention to him. Tijfo098 (talk) 14:09, 9 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep Seems notable to me as judged by cited refs. Have added a couple of refs. (Also is Otto Haupt: Emil Hilb, Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker Vereinigung, 42, 1933, S. 183-198 1933 or 1932?) This source http://www.didaktik.mathematik.uni-wuerzburg.de/history/vollrath/papers/073.pdf seems very useful as has a list of biographies of Hilb and a list of his publications. (Msrasnw (talk) 17:00, 9 May 2011 (UTC))[reply]
• Keep on basis above. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:34, 10 May 2011 (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.