Making fun of Britannica Talk

The EB article about "real numbers" claims that every set of real numbers with an upper bound has a least upper bound; this is false.

Is this false? can you give an example?. I'm under the impression that it is true. In fact, I just took it out of the page because the real number page says exactly the opposite.

Please contemplate the empty set and then put the comment back in. --AxelBoldt

I'm not sure you can consider the empty set "a set of real numbers"...It is clearly a subset of the real numbers, but I am not convinced it is the same. --AN

Allright, let's give the poor and abused editors of EB the benefit of the doubt :-) --AxelBoldt

I just restored the Big Oh and FFT paragraphs. The page is there to counter the common claim that Wikipedia can never be as accurate and complete as EB; the point of the page is that EB is neither as accurate nor as complete as people make it out to be. The first sentence of the article explains that goal.

Pointing out incompletenesses in EB is not hypocritical: nobody claims Wikipedia to be complete, but many people think EB is complete. --AxelBoldt

I suppose so, and apologize for simply making the remove instead of suggesting it first. Wikipedia is nowhere near as complete as Britannica, and omissions in the second don't serve to prove that it could be, so the above doesn't help with the goal stated. And I think it is a double standard to point out the Britannica is incomplete, and then turn around and say it doesn't matter that Wikipedia is or isn't. But hypocritical was definitely poor word choice.

But who says that it doesn't matter that Wikipedia is incomplete? I think everybody wants it to be more complete, and also everybody acknowledges that EB is vastly more accurate and complete than Wikipedia. So ultimately, this page is just propaganda, showing the tiny little specks where Wikipedia is better than EB and ignoring the vast ocean of inadequacies. I'll make that clearer in the first paragraph. --AxelBoldt