Talk:Mensuration

RfC: Should Mensuration be changed to a disambiguation page or a full article, or should it continues to be a redirect to Measurement?

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Is Mensuration considered as a branch of Mathematics? According to here, Mensuration is considered as a branch and should not be redirected to Measurement. It was also noticed by 117.194.32.217 in 2008 (He or she wrote "Mensuration is not the same as measurement. This redirecting is incorrect").Good afternoon (talk) 02:36, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Question: Should Mensuration be changed to a disambiguation page or a full article, or should it continue to redirect to Measurement? Added by Roches (talk) 15:08, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Survey

• Article at least. Mensuration is a branch of applied mathematics. It is of fundamental importance, both practically and theoretically. It takes a surprising amount of looking to find so much as a coherent treatment of the concept, let alone a comprehensive one, and when you do, it is usually in a dictionary, written from a very narrow point of view. To be sure there are disambiguation aspects, but every non-trivial subject has such aspects and we must not let ourselves be distracted by that. An example of the limited points of view is concentration on the geometrical aspects, but actually any quantitative determination (or prediction or specification) of physical (or sometimes even abstract) parameters by the application of mathematical operations on the results of measurements is mensuration. (So is measurement itself, but only in a trivial or degenerate sense. If I put a ruler to a nail, that is measurement. If I put a ruler to a flagpole I need to go beyond that measurement and apply concepts of mensuration if I want to know its length.) If I calculate the mass of a tank of gas from measurement of a selection of parameters with a ruler to get its volume and of other instruments to get the density of a sample, or the magnifying power of a lens from having measured the parameters necessary for application of the Lensmaker's equation, such as refractive index and curvature, or the radioactivity from the count of clicks, or the age of a rock by combining the clicks with readings form a mass spectrometer, determination of the variables, and how to calculate the desired result from them, are problems in mensuration, over and above the simple idea of measurement. Obviously the act of measurement, such of longitude and latitude by use of GPS receivers, instead of sextants and chronometers, that looks very much like a basic operation, but internally whole fields of mensuration are invisible to the user, and even incomprehensible to most. WP would be a pretty miserable encyclopaedia if the best we could offer were a redir to measurement, or fobbing a reader off by speaking of nothing but geometry. The subject of mensuration is not one of my qualifications, but if there no mensurationist is available, I don't mind producing a first pass at not much beyond the stub level, from which more competent editors could proceed. JonRichfield (talk) 08:16, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
• Article - I don't have the strongest math background, but glancing at this I get the impression that Mensuration is notable and distinct from measurement. NickCT (talk) 15:14, 4 August 2014 (UTC)
• Support disambiguation. Roches (talk) 15:08, 24 July 2014 (UTC)
• disambiguation Staszek Lem (talk) 00:47, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
• Article, not disambiguation page. There should be a "see also" at the top of the article (for "measurement" and "forest mensuration"), but the subject is a significant discipline within mathematics. These days the term itself is rarely used; I was taught it by name, as I went to an extremely traditional (i.e. old-fashioned!) school, but many people I know simply covered the subject under the general rubric of "geometry". Nevertheless, the subject is notable in its own right, and anyone who has studied mathematics at school will have encountered the topic (usually in the form of questions like "if a circular sandpit of radius 5 feet is to be filled with sand to a depth of 2 feet, and sand costs one pound per cubic foot, how much will this cost?"). RomanSpa (talk) 05:58, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Threaded discussion

I added a question to the initial RfC post with three options for this page. I did not know what mensuration means. I imagine most readers do not know, so they are not well served by a redirect to Measurement. I think a disambiguation page is a better solution. Something like this:

• the act of measuring the size of an object
• the branch of geometry concerned with determining area, volume, or circumference from one or more measurements of a shape.

Roches (talk) 15:08, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Agree that Mensuration needs its own article. I'm also not familiar with the term. But I do know that the concept of how to take measurements accurately and determining what exactly is meant by some measurement is itself a field of study. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aflafla1 (talk • contribs) 23:26, 29 July 2014

I think that Mensuration is actually a branch of Mathematics, and it should have its own article. --Good afternoon (talk) 09:49, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

• Before jumping with an opinion, I followed a good practice and consulted with google. And quickly found that the term "mensuration" is used not only in applied mathematics. Basically, mensuration is a theory of measurement in particular area. In other words, "Measurement" is an act, and "mensuration" is how to do measurements in a specific area, e.g., in mathematics. By the way, google books shows that this is a pretty much obsolete term. How it resurfaces today, ask world wide web. Also, one sees that mensuration is used synonymously to measurement. There is at least one more meaning, in music: Mensuration and Proportion Signs: Origins and Evolution. Three distinct meanings means disambig, plain and simple. After consulting with wikipedia itself, doing it right now Staszek Lem (talk) 01:00, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
• If somebody takes on mensuration (mathematics), IMO the article must be dominated by "history" section. IMO it is a reason that in maths the term is rather archaic: in the past, especially in long past, geometric measurements were kinda revelation, a separate arcane discipline. Nowadays it is a rather mundane thing, not collected into a separate discipline, and measurements of a particular geometric shape is considered to be an inherent part of the study of the object itself. Staszek Lem (talk) 01:28, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

I think that Mensuration (branch of Math) is important enough to named as Mensuration, not mensuration (mathematics).--Good afternoon (talk) 09:54, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.