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Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

nautil.us

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Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#91

Post by mcbuilder »

elondaits wrote: post #42
neutronicus wrote: post #17

Earlier 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"

Not everything is easy to Google: C, D, F, R, COM, .NET, node ...

C and R turn up top results with the single letter, D works if you add "language", F is more niche but not hard with some Google Fu, same with the other examples. Not everything is easy to Google, but I find those to be very niche or technical topics, e.g. a random linker error that has many other similar terms with another set of related errors.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#92

Post by markgall »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #48

This falls a little flat with me. Let's consider an example from the article- a Kähler manifold. I'm not a geometer, so I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it says that a "Kähler manifold is a manifold with three mutually compatible structures: a complex structure, a Riemannian structure, and a symplectic structure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4hler_manifold Two of those things are not named after a person, and…

This example is made even sillier when one realizes that that "complex" and "symplectic" actually mean the same thing, but the former is Latin and the latter is Greek. It is essentially the same "everyday" description being applied two to quite different mathematical objects.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#93

Post by ardit33 »

crazygringo wrote: post #55

Hard disagree. Once you get to the advanced levels of any field, terminology being "accessible" doesn't really matter, but being precise does . Areas like philosophy and law actually suffer in my opinion when they overload common words with uncommon meanings, or descend into weird disambiguations that depend on suffixes. For example, in philosophy there's "contractarianism" and "contractualism", and trying to remembe…

I Disagree with you, in Computer Science we have things like: "Quick Sort", "Merge Sort", "Map", "Hashtable", "LRU", etc... etc...

They are much more descriptive and easy to remember, even though the Algorithms can be complex themselves. Event the name "Boolean", could be changed to "Conditional"... and be even more readable. Also, Dijkstra algorithm can be generalized to "Shortest Path Algorithm" (there can be more than one).

Math, and physics to some degree, have become self-referential to the point that start becoming more esoteric magic black books to beginners...

While CS was born out of Math folks, and unfortunately has adopted some of the same esoteric symbolics, I hope Computer Science doesn't follow that path on the long term, otherwise it will become divorced from day to day real life applications.

Let me give you a clear example:

Now, imagine if we called Double Linked Lists as "Darombolo lists", or whoever invented it. (I made up that name), Double Linked List is very easy to visualize and remember. "Giacomo Darombolo List", is not, and just adds to 'must cram/memorize' things to make things work.....

I personally don't like "cramming" useless trivia in order to work in my field. I hope Computer Science divorces from Math, and takes its own path to more logical naming of things and less useless symbols used in it.

It is like the whole field suffers because the authors' Narcissism, that they must name things after them.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#94

Post by stan_rogers »

TylerE wrote: post #68
kazinator wrote: post #41

> Imagine how much steeper the learning curve would be in medicine or law if they used the same naming conventions, with the same number of layers to peel back: I she kidding? Off the top of my head: diseases named after people. Parkinson's disease. McArdle's disease. Bell's Palsy, Hodgkin's Lymphoma, ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_anatomical_parts... In Law, precedents are referred to by plaintiff a…

In medicine they are often named after the first (documented) patient, not the discoverer.

"Often", here, should be read as "quite rarely".

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#96

Post by mjw1007 »

saithound wrote: post #50

This is one of those articles that might sound convincing to non-mathematicians (because it is annoying to learn names for difficult concepts, and many people can relate to that experience), but will not sound all that convincing to domain experts. It'd be hard to deny that descriptive terms are easier to memorize. Sometimes a piece of natural and/or physical intuition allows such terminology to arise. Scientist and…

If you summarise the article as "John Conway was good at thinking of names. Try to be more like John Conway.", then I think many mathematicians will think it's a reasonable suggestion.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#97

Post by gjulianm »

i_cannot_hack wrote: post #79
saithound wrote: post #50

This is one of those articles that might sound convincing to non-mathematicians (because it is annoying to learn names for difficult concepts, and many people can relate to that experience), but will not sound all that convincing to domain experts. It'd be hard to deny that descriptive terms are easier to memorize. Sometimes a piece of natural and/or physical intuition allows such terminology to arise. Scientist and…

At first I agreed with you, but I think your analogy to algorithms actually somewhat counters your point. The Wikipedia article for Dijkstra's algorithm gives an alternative name of "Shortest Path First", or "SPF algorithm", which I do think is a much better and more descriptive name. It also made me think of sorting algorithms, which all have wonderfully snappy and descriptive names. I think the world would be a sad…

The issue is that some concepts can't have descriptive names, unless you just explain the whole concept. For example. Lipschitz or Holder continuous function, or Riemanninan manifold... Whenever concepts can be described with a good name, those names tend to be used, but unfortunately a lot of times we just can't.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#98

Post by matthewfelgate »

wenc wrote: post #20
seles wrote: post #8

There'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.

For AWS, there's a website called "AWS in Plain English" that explain what each service does. For instance, it's pretty hard to guess what AWS Route53 does unless you've come across it elsewhere. https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/ Azure naming is comparatively more pedestrian.

Thanks for sharing. That's actually really useful.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#99

Post by bsza »

archgoon wrote: post #13

Yep; check out how the programming community does it! We have descriptive names for things like "Apache", "React", "nginx", "Rust", and "Java"!

These are names for products though, not programming concepts. A more accurate analogy would be calling a class a Kay template or calling a for loop a Lovelace construct. And it's great that we don't do that.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#100

Post by ehmmmmmmmm »

yongjik wrote: post #82

Meh, that's like saying it's so hard to remember San Francisco from San Jose from Mountain View from Palo Alto, why can't we just name them as Big Sea City, Big South City, Middle Town, and Expensive Town. I.e., it's a fake problem that only sounds plausible to outsiders - if you live in the Bay Area, then Mountain View being called Mountain View is the least of your problems in driving to Mountain View.

Agree, although as a Mountain View resident I'm pretty disgruntled that there is neither mountain nor view here. A town like Mammoth Lakes, CA would be a better candidate to deserve the name "Mountain View".

Jokes aside there are places in the world that name themselves much more intuitively like you described.

Beijing = northern capital

Nanjing = southern capital

Shanghai = on the sea

Hong Kong = fragrant harbor

Xi'an = western peace

Tokyo = eastern capital

Taipei = north Tai

Tainan = south Tai

Taichung = middle Tai

Taitung = east Tai

Shandong = east mountains

Shanxi = west mountains etc.

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