Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
1–10 of 406 posts
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#2Some profiling would show that names increase the difficulty of math by 0.001%. I don’t see an issue here.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#3Compensation in academia is already bad enough. Take away the boosts to the ego and you are going to make the politics even more toxic, and potentially cripple an entire generation.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#4This is the nature of mathematics.
Statements and theorems are extremely dense with information, where every word might have a it's own area of study.
Of a problem may begin with something benign like, the following function is blah blah, but even then, the term function is well defined, and you may need to know the intricacies of functions to be able to solve the problem.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#5Do the work and you can name it whatever you want.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#6I fear the alternative would be all the good names becoming heavily overloaded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#7The lack of eponymous names used in category theory, for example, do nothing to aid in learning it. The term functor is no more descriptive than Carnap mapping.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#8There's an equally annoying problem in software engineering at large corporations (aka Google), where hundreds of services you need to know about are named with some cute name that gives you no idea what the thing actually is.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#9if you think maths is bad you should take a look at geology. At least mathematicians stick to their names or names of other mathematicians.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#10Sounds reasonable. Let's call this new policy "Ball's Law".