Template:Did you know nominations/Turán's brick factory problem

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Cwmhiraeth (talk) 05:11, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

Turán's brick factory problem

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• ... that Pál Turán asked how to draw graphs with few crossed edges in order to smooth the cart tracks in the brick factory he was forced to work in during World War II? Source: The actual reference is Turán (1977) but that's likely to be paywalled. A relevant quote from that reference, which also sources the forced nature of the work, can be found at the Springer EOM used elsewhere in the references.

• Reviewed: Lorna Arnold

Improved to Good Article status by David Eppstein (talk). Self-nominated at 05:43, 20 September 2017 (UTC).

• QPQ done, GA, in time, long enough, hook is interesting, within policy, no copyvio issues, AGF on source, everything is fine. Good to go! Adityavagarwal (talk) 07:50, 20 September 2017 (UTC)

• IMO the piped link is too long and the hook is hard to follow. What do you think about:
• ALT1a: ... that while forced to work in a brick factory during World War II, Hungarian mathematician Pál Turán devised a solution for minimizing the number of crossings in the tracks used to ferry bricks? Yoninah (talk) 22:10, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

• Unfortunately that's not accurate. He posed the problem, not its solution. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:16, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

• @David Eppstein: I was confused by the term "asked how to draw". Is this more accurate? Or do you have another suggestion for shortening the piped link?
• ALT1b: ... that while forced to work in a brick factory during World War II, Hungarian mathematician Pál Turán posed the problem of how to minimize the number of crossings of tracks used to ferry bricks? Yoninah (talk) 11:40, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

• But it's still not really accurate. The problem he posed was more abstract than you make it sound. He was *inspired* by the question of minimizing track-crossings to pose a more abstract question, the one about minimizing crossings in graph drawings. You're taking a hook about math, for an article about math, and sucking all the math out of it. Your version makes it sound like the purpose of the tracks is important to the question and that tracks used for a different purpose would have different numbers of crossings. And I still don't see what's wrong with the original hook. Where is "link too long" anywhere in DYK rules or MOS guidelines? That said, here's a version that shortens the link and makes the abstraction step more explicit:

• ALT2: ... that when Pál Turán was forced to work in a brick factory during World War II, the bumpy crossings of the cart tracks inspired him to ask how to draw graphs with few crossings?

—David Eppstein (talk) 02:10, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

• Yes, thank you, that's simplified enough for us non-math people and is also written more succinctly. Offline ALT2 hook ref AGF and cited inline. Rest of review per Adityavagarwal. ALT2 good to go. Yoninah (talk) 16:38, 2 October 2017 (UTC)