Talk:Möbius function
Rewrite?[change source]
The page as written needs a lot of improvement. Beyond a superficial clean up, I have these concerns:
- There is an n in the formula for the function, but not the inputs. (Maybe n is supposed to be d, which is an input which is not used in the definition of the function.) So there seems to be errors in the information already on the page.
- When searching for more information about a function called the Mobius function and defined in this way, I can only find sources referring to the "usual" number theoretic Mobius function, which takes as an input a natural number and whose output is defined by the prime decomposition of that number. I'm unable to find any sources talking about using a Mobius function, or any function with a similar definition to this, for random number generation. Granted, an application like random number generation is not the math I'm most familiar with, so it's possible I'm missing something.
Especially given the last point, I am inclined to rewrite this article to refer to the typical number theoretic Mobius function. I'd be happy to make it a different Wikipedia page, or to give both Mobius functions their own sections in a larger article, but I'm not sure I'm set to improve the existing information in the article. So as it is now, I would likely delete the current information.
The original author was an IP user, and this page doesn't have a very frequent history, but I wanted to reach out before making such a drastic change.