Talk:Common fixed point problem

I believe that this subject is notable due to:

• The significant amount of attention given to the problem during the period when it was unsolved, as evidenced by the sources
• The publication of articles and papers about the problem even decades after it was solved (the articles by Brown and McDowell, and the master's thesis by McCroskey)
• The continued relevance of Baxter permutations, which arose directly from research into this problem
• References to the work of Boyce and/or Huneke in recent research, e.g., "On distal flows and common fixed point theorems in Banach spaces" (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmaa.2022.126995), published in 2023, references the "Commuting functions with no common fixed point" paper
• Showing up on Math StackExchange and other sites from time to time (e.g., https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4413605/continuous-function-on-the-unit-interval-with-commuting-compositions)

Citation needed

Regarding a citation for the statement "Huneke's paper is notable for its first-principles approach to the problem, not relying on any of the work done by earlier mathematicians." My source is Huneke's paper itself. It only has three references: two are to Boyce's dissertation and his Transactions paper, and the third is to Huneke's own dissertation. WillisBlackburn (talk) 17:20, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Did you know nomination

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• Article history

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• ... that in 1967, two mathematicians published PhD dissertations independently disproving the same thirteen-year-old conjecture?

• Source: "The purpose of this paper is to answer Dyer's question in the negative by the construction of a pair of commuting functions which have no fixed point in common. [...] This paper is a condensation of the author's 1967 doctoral dissertation", from a paper by Boyce . "It has been conjectured that any two continuous functions f, g mapping the closed unit interval into itself which commute under composition [...] must have a common fixed point [...] Chapter 2 defines a pair of functions which show that the conjecture is false", from Huneke's 1967 PhD dissertation.

• Reviewed:
• Comment: If the reviewer doesn't have ProQuest access, I can provide a copy of Huneke's dissertation over email.

Created by WillisBlackburn (talk). Number of QPQs required: 0. Nominator has fewer than 5 past nominations.

jlwoodwa (talk) 19:15, 16 October 2024 (UTC).

I'd like a copy of the Huneke disseration if you could provide it. Do you also have access to the Boyce dissertation? I only have the paper published in Transactions AMS. WillisBlackburn (talk) 21:23, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Boyce is ProQuest 288201093. I appear to have access if you don't, but maybe the Wikipedia Library works for this?

Incidentally there is a [citation needed] tag and a few sentences at the ends of paragraphs that are not supported by footnotes that should be footnoted. Per WP:DYKCITE, every claim in a DYK article (not counting the summaries of later sourced material in the lead) must have a reference, not later than the end of its paragraph. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:41, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

I now have both. I'm going to have to change the statement that Huneke doesn't reference the prior researchers, because his dissertation does. The dissertation also includes a lot of narrative not in the paper he published in Transactions. WillisBlackburn (talk) 14:59, 18 October 2024 (UTC)