Talk:William Martin Boyce

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	This article was accepted from this draft on 21 July 2025 by reviewer GregariousMadness (talk · contribs).

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WillisBlackburn (talk · contribs) This user has declared a connection. (Article subject is my father.)

Willam Martin Boyce is notable for his papers on commuting functions and callable bond valuation, which have been cited over 100 times.

Article declined due to insufficient sourcing

@Ktkvtsh Could you help me understand what you're looking for in terms of additional sources? I get that someone is not notable merely for writing papers. But his papers were published in academic journals and have numerous citations, and (as noted by the Robert Brown source) his computer-assisted proof of the existence of commuting functions with no common fixed point preceded the computer-assisted proof of the four color theorem by nine years. Kenneth Appel, the mathematician who worked on that proof, has a Wikipedia article, and it seems very similar to this one: mostly biographical, links to own papers, etc. WillisBlackburn (talk) 13:51, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You can't use self published sources (the subjects own works). Also, you should not submit or edit this article, as you have stated on your talk page that there is a conflict of interest between you and the subject of the article. Ktkvtsh (talk) 23:26, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The papers by William Boyce that I cited in the article were not self-published.

According to the Wikipedia policy on self-published works (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_using_self-published_works):

A source is self-published if the author and the publisher are the same.
Research published in peer-reviewed journals is not self-published.

All of the papers I used as sources were published in peer-reviewed journals (and are identified as such in the article):

"Commuting Functions with No Common Fixed Point" was published in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, a peer-reviewed journal (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactions_of_the_American_Mathematical_Society)
"Stopping Rules for Selling Bonds" was published in The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, which is now called the RAND Journal of Economics, a peer-reviewed journal (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_RAND_Journal_of_Economics).
"Optimum Bond Calling and Refunding" was published in Interfaces, which is now called INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics, a peer-reviewed journal (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INFORMS_Journal_on_Applied_Analytics).

Furthermore, the Robert F. Brown paper I used as a source, "A Good Question Won't Go Away: An Example Of Mathematical Research", was published in The American Mathematical Monthly, a peer-reviewed journal (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mathematical_Monthly).

Regarding my authorship of the article, Wikipedia does not prohibit people with a conflict from proposing new articles. I disclosed my conflict and am proposing this article through the Articles for Creation process. WillisBlackburn (talk) 02:30, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Subsequent to writing this article, I wrote an article about the common fixed point problem, which Boyce solved in 1967. This article was accepted and was featured on the Wikipedia home page ("Did you know...") on December 29. I have rewritten this biographical article to focus on that and Boyce's documented contributions to bond modeling and finance. WillisBlackburn (talk) 19:35, 2 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Another reviewer will take a look at it. Ktkvtsh (talk) 21:47, 2 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Argument for notability

I am resubmitting and ask that you reconsider this article. I make two points: first, that the article itself establishes notability by showing that Boyce solved a "major problem" in mathematics and includes multiple independent sources; and second, that Wikipedia:Notability tells us that "notability is based on the existence of suitable sources, not on the state of sourcing in an article," and there are additional real-world sources that establish notability.

The decline notice said that the draft needs to:

meet any of the eight academic-specific criteria
or cite multiple reliable, secondary sources independent of the subject, which cover the subject in some depth

Criterion 1 states: "The person's research has had a significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources." The page further states: "Criterion 1 can also be satisfied if the person has pioneered or developed a significant new concept, technique or idea, made a significant discovery or solved a major problem in their academic discipline."

The article shows that Boyce "solved a major problem in their academic discipline:" the commuting function conjecture, which had been unproven for 13 years despite the efforts of other mathematicians. Boyce's paper on this, published in 1969, has been cited dozens of times, including 20 citations just in the last 5 years. Note this is a lower bound on the number of citations; it's easy to find papers that cite Boyce but are not counted on Zentralblatt, such as "The Number of Baxter Permutations." Google Scholar shows 107 citations for the paper.

Boyce's solution was also covered by multiple independent sources: "Coincidence Values of Commuting Functions," published in Topology Proceedings in 2009, which also covers some of his later research on the same topic, and "A Good Question Won't Go Away: An Example Of Mathematical Research" published in The American Mathematical Monthly in 2014 (unfortunately PDF on author's web site has vanished; contact me for a copy). The second article provides details about the work that was enabled by Boyce's discovery: "Like a stone thrown into a still pond that sends out ripples in all directions, this question [the common fixed point conjecture] and its answer were just the starting points for wide-ranging research."

Additional evidence of the impact of Boyce's work comes from the numerous papers on the subject of Baxter permutations, which were not well-known until Boyce used them to generate his commuting function conjecture counterexample. In fact, they are called Baxter permutations because that is the name that Boyce gave them, as acknowledged by the "Coincidence Values" article ("Permutations that are w-admissible were renamed Baxter permutations by Boyce [6] who subsequently used them as his main tool toward settling the common fixed point conjecture"), by a paper titled "Baxter Permutations Rise Again" published in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory ("Baxter permutations, so named by Boyce, ..."), and also by Knuth in his "Baxter matrices" paper ("what we now call Baxter permutations were originally called reduced Baxter permutations. See [Boyce paper]").

Boyce is also credited with pioneering the application of Baxter permutations to problems other than the common fixed point conjecture via his paper "Baxter permutations and functional composition." From the paper "The Number of Baxter Permutations," which is cited in the Baxter permutations article: "However, it has recently been pointed out by Boyce [6] that Baxter permutations are of more general significance in analysis than had previously been realized."

"The Number of Baxter Permutations" expands on a sequence of values started by Boyce: "The recurrence for T,(i,j) in (2) was derived in 1967 by one of the authors (R. L. Graham) in response to a query of W. M. Boyce, who had already tabulated the values of B(n) for small values of n (see [Boyce paper])." As noted in the paper, the original Boyce values were published in the original printed edition of the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. The Baxter permutation sequences in the online edition (A001181, A001183, A001185, and A214358) all cite Boyce. The sequences A003125, A003126, A003127, and A256827 also cite Boyce.

I believe that all of this makes a convincing case for notability. Thank you for your consideration. WillisBlackburn (talk) 20:09, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewing AfC submission

Hello @S0091:, I've decided that I'd like to review this AfC submission. I see that you've left the comment "See talk page" on July 19, but I'm not seeing your comments here. Is there anything in @WillisBlackburn:'s comments above that you object to? I'm leaning towards accepting this draft per WillisBlackburn's claim that Boyce proved the common fixed point problem which, if true, would qualify them to be notable per WP:NPROF. So far, from my research, this claim does seem to check out, although the PDF link in the citation after "William M. Boyce and John P. Huneke independently" in the common fixed point problem article appears to be broken. I was able to find the actual PDF elsewhere, but this link may want to be fixed @WillisBlackburn. GregariousMadness (talk to me!) 12:20, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Robert F. Brown article was being served from his home directory, which UCLA appears to have cleaned up following his death in 2022. It's still available through the usual subscription services, and I have a copy. It's too bad because it's a really good article. I emailed Brown to ask him for help with the common fixed point problem article, but, being dead, he didn't get back to me. I'll fix the reference. WillisBlackburn (talk) 14:06, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@GregariousMadness no objections. In fact, I thought it needed another pair of eyes after @WillisBlackburn came to my talk page so I asked them post here so go for it. S0091 (talk) 14:36, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I just read the discussion between you and @WillisBlackburn on your talk page, and now it all makes sense. Excellent, I'll go ahead and approve of this submission! Thanks for your help. GregariousMadness (talk to me!) 14:48, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you @GregariousMadness and @S0091!

I added a couple of links (most notably from the common fixed point problem page) so the article is no longer an orphan. WillisBlackburn (talk) 16:29, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]