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Talk:Greg Hjorth

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'bout time :-)

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Thanks to MrsHudson for finally creating this article. I've made a few edits. I should disclose that Greg was my dissertation advisor; please let me know of anything that appears non-neutral.

I'd like to find a source for his dissertation title. You can look it up on ProQuest or MathSciNet, but those are difficult to access for folks not at a university. The Mathematics Genealogy Project, unfortunately, got it wrong, transcribing u2 as N2. Also you'd think there would be a the before second; does anyone have an actual copy?

(Anecdote that would be great to include if anyone can source it: Supposedly he wanted to call the thesis The Influence of U2, like the band, but the powers-that-were wouldn't let him.)

Finally, there's the touchy point of whether we give priority to the mathematics or the chess. My sense is that, although I'm sure he could have done a lot of damage in the chess world if he'd kept with it, he picked mathematics instead, and that is where his influence was greater. --Trovatore (talk) 23:15, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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Short description

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In this edit, Pizzachu44 changed the short description from one that described him as a math professor to one that describes him as a chess player.

Since Greg was my Ph.D. advisor I will refrain from editing this article directly, but I have to protest this change. Greg was undoubtedly a very strong chess player but he was not even a GM; he is never going to be remembered primarily for chess. (He made a deliberate choice to step away from chess; he advised young players at some point that if they weren't in the top 100 in the world by the age of, not sure, 20 or so, they should quit.) On the other hand he was instrumental in opening up an entire new subfield of descriptive set theory.

My preferred description would be something like "mathematical logician and set theorist". You could add "Australian" if you absolutely have to but I think it's a little misleading given that much of his most important work was done in the United States (also, I just think nationality is overemphasized in our bios in general and not important enough to include in short descriptions). --Trovatore (talk) 23:25, 27 May 2026 (UTC) I have notified the Mathematics and Chess WikiProjects. --Trovatore (talk) 23:45, 27 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

You can change it back if you want. I only removed the mathematics professor part because it would have been too long otherwise. Pizzachu44 (talk) 00:37, 28 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
When you start typing into the Wikipedia search box, you see a list of article titles, each of which is followed by the article's short description. This is the main, and perhaps the only, role of the short description; it helps to disambiguate, to make it easier to figure out which article is the one you had in mind.
If the short description gets truncated in this display, it doesn't serve its purpose, and so it's necessary to keep short descriptions short. WP:SDSHORT suggests 40 characters, but that's only an approximation. It's possible you will find "Australian mathematician and chess player" will be too long; if so you will have to find a way to shorten it. From your description, I suppose that just removing the word "Australian" might be satisfactory.
Since you do have a tie to him I understand why you don't want to do this edit yourself, but if it comes down to that, I don't think you would be faulted for WP:COI editing. Bruce leverett (talk) 01:22, 28 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I tried to comply with WP:SDNOTDEF. fgnievinski (talk) 03:15, 28 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I think it should just be "mathematician (... - ...)". The main thing about short descriptions is that they should be as short as possible in my view, just enough for disambiguation and no longer. I wouldn't add Australian, the type of mathematics, and certainly not chess player. Sławomir Biały (talk) 07:03, 28 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks all. --Trovatore (talk) 18:38, 28 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
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