Talk:Hierarchy (mathematics)

Untitled

I've removed the prod tag. While I do agree that this is not a mathematical topic in itself, it is a frequently used terminology and could be a useful, although not central, article. Pascal.Tesson 17:01, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

What material exactly do you think belongs in the page? Right now, the page is extremely confusing, and what material makes sense is just the definition of a partial order. What about a merge and redirect to Partial order? CMummert 17:10, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, I don't claim that the page is great as it is, but why should it be merged? In many cases, hierarchies are not partial orders. For instance, the polynomial hierarchy for all we know could collapse to one level. There is a distinct meaning and intention behind the use of the hierarchy terminology. Sure, the article can be made better by making the description more precise but I think the page should stay separate. Pascal.Tesson 06:49, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

The edited article is fine as it stands, on its own, although I don't think it will ever be much more than a stub. The previous version was just a vague description of the properties of a partial order, so this is much better CMummert 12:35, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

I would have thought a hierarchy was (essentially) a tree of classes. This is more restrictive that your definition because each class can have only one 'parent'. If a hierarchy really is more general, please explain why. Eprayner (talk) 01:22, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Focus

This article doesn't define what it's talking about, nor cite any sources. If this is indeed a terminology in use then it should have either a formal definition or more than three examples that make the pattern abundantly clear. Otherwise, I'd say this should be merged to partial order. siddharthist (talk) 04:24, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

Is a mathematical term invented in this article?

I was looking for a mathematical definition of the term "hierarchy" and only found this Wikipedia article. Even after searching for relevant literature, I did not find anything defining the term "hierarchy" as a set equipped with a preorder.

It is a good definition for the term, but the article is misleading. It should either collect mathematical definitions that contain the term "hierarchy" or it should explain the most fundamental concept connecting all of them. It should not introduce a formal definition of a term that is not available in the literature.

If I am wrong, it would be great if one reference to a book or scientific publication could be added where "hierarchy" is used as a term for "preordered set". If there is not one, I am also in favour of either merging the article (as suggested by others above) or re-writing it in a way that no new definitions are invented. Altarbasenstickfreie (talk) 08:14, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

I just saw that in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy#Mathematical_representation a source is given. Altarbasenstickfreie (talk) 08:25, 10 October 2024 (UTC)