Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

Post by chongli » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:18 PM UTC

abnry wrote: post #85

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…

> Let's not get rid of our ability to honor people in a failed attempt to make the communication more effective. I think we should honor mathematicians less with eponymous theorems (prestige culture is toxic), but I agree it shouldn't be done at the expense of worse communication.

Post by d2v » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:23 PM UTC

abnry wrote: post #88

superhuzza wrote: post #21

I 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.

This is exactly how I feel. What I do think you can criticize, however, is the lack of imagination mathematicians have in naming theorems. If only there were more Ham Sandwich Theorems [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem

Post by dragonwriter » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:24 PM UTC

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…

Post by fortran77 » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:27 PM UTC

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…

Post by pessimizer » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:28 PM UTC

lixtra wrote: post #64

will4274 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 0.001% How did you come up with this number? You took 100,000 samples and 99,999 of them agreed? I don't personally know 100,000 mathematicians.

I first estimated 1% but decided that that is much too high. But let’s make an experiment. Let an average high school student memorize these names: A Calabi-Yau manifold is a compact, complex Kähler manifold with a trivial first Chern class. And now let her explain what the above definition is about.