We all know what this article is really about. It is disappointing to see these kinds of articles on hn. (posted multiple times as well)
ref: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
31–40 of 406 posts
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#32Not sure how feasible or necessary this is in general, but there are certainly some places for improvement. Some more modern examples than "isosceles": - Heaviside function → step function (edit: though maybe this one is, amusingly, already descriptive by accident?) - Fourier domain → frequency domain While I'm here, just a couple suggestions from me: - Markov chain → memoryless chain - Lebesgue integral → horizontal…
Was prepared to dislike these suggestions but I think they're all solid. Good thinking.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#33My biggest gripe with mathematical naming isn't what the author wrote, but by the inconsistency of noun/adjective endings. For example, Hermitian and Brownian are adjectives, much like Ethiopian or Libertarian or anything else ending in -ian. But Hamiltonian, Jacobian, and Lagrangian are nouns. I'd much prefer they be called the Hamilton, the Jacob, and the Lagrange, for consistency in syntax in parsing.
It always trips up my mental English parser when someone says "the Hamiltonian" and I'm always like "the Hamiltonian what? what is or isn't Hamiltonian?"
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#34> "In the last decade, the field of algebraic geometry was set on fire by “perfectoid spaces” rather than “Scholze spaces” because Peter Scholze kept on calling them that in his talks and papers."
Skip to 5:10 to see Peter Scholze apologize for the name: https://youtu.be/J0QdTYZIfIM
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#35We all know what this article is really about. It is disappointing to see these kinds of articles on hn. (posted multiple times as well) ref: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Speaking as a mathematician, I have zero idea what you think this article is "really about." So (a) your statement has at least one counterexample, and (b) would you be so kind as to explain what it's really about?
Edit: you added a link to a pg essay about self-censorship. Pretty droll excuse to not say what you mean.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because "easy to google" is much more important in the short, medium, and long runs than "easy to guess what it does"
Rust, Go, C, D, R, Flask, Rocket.
Append programming language to the query for searching.
Imagine C++ would be named as "Object oriented, generic, general purpose programming language with C compatibility"(of course C won't be named C then).
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#37We all know what this article is really about. It is disappointing to see these kinds of articles on hn. (posted multiple times as well) ref: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
> We all know what this article is really about
I don’t. What is this article really about?
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#38I actually agree with the author's premise, I think she makes a good case that some of these concepts would be both more approachable, and more memorable, with simpler names. However, coming up with simple names is incredibly difficult. It's easy to write a 10,000 word on a complicated topic, but incredibly difficult to squish it into a few letters.
Yes, agreed with the second part.
>"Why do mathematicians continue to proffer and accept this courtesy, when it increases their own mental load and makes their own work more opaque?" (the OP) //
I imagine because it doesn't increase their mental load? It might even reduce it; abstraction is a principle component of the field after all.
Using descriptive names sounds like it requires a half-arsed disabstraction, a series of munged verbose partial truths?
Naming for authors is partially self-documenting too, though practically that's probably not often useful.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#39Not sure how feasible or necessary this is in general, but there are certainly some places for improvement. Some more modern examples than "isosceles": - Heaviside function → step function (edit: though maybe this one is, amusingly, already descriptive by accident?) - Fourier domain → frequency domain While I'm here, just a couple suggestions from me: - Markov chain → memoryless chain - Lebesgue integral → horizontal…
I'd be concerned that memoryless is misleading for markovian. A markov chain can be used to represent a fixed, nonzero memory, since if you have an n-state dfa D you can take the set of pairs of the states of D (or specifically D + null) and reweight them. The markov chain over D^2 has no memory over D^2, but does have memory over D, and this is often a useful property (bigrams).
You repeat this operation to get more and more (but always a fixed constant maximum) history.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#40I actually agree with the author's premise, I think she makes a good case that some of these concepts would be both more approachable, and more memorable, with simpler names. However, coming up with simple names is incredibly difficult. It's easy to write a 10,000 word on a complicated topic, but incredibly difficult to squish it into a few letters.
And bad naming might even make things worse as the reader might get the wrong idea.