Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other • Hacker News Board

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#111

Post by tzs » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:29 PM UTC

woopwoop wrote: post #28

I don't think descriptive names per se would be especially helpful. The challenge of understanding a concept typically dwarfs the challenge of remembering a name. Some people, though, have so many things named after them that Googling for concepts can become challenging. In my thesis, I needed to use something called the Steiner point, which is sometimes also called the Steiner curvature centroid, although I didn't k…

Georg Steller (1709-1746) was like that, but in biology rather than math. Things named after him:

Steller's jay, Steller's eider, Steller's sea eagle, Steller's sea cow, Steller's sea lion, and the Stellera genus of flowing plants. Oh, also the mineral Stellerite. He's also in the scientific names of a couple others: Cryptochiton stelleri (a marine mollusc) and Atremisia stelleriana (a plant in the sunflower family). And a school: Steller Secondary School in Anchorage, Alaska.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Steller

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#112

Post by tareqak » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:29 PM UTC

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…

What about names like Page Rank?

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#113

Post by Rebelgecko » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

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…

>Naming things after their creator is actually super-helpful because it's really easy to disambiguate

For the most part I agree with you, however there are some notable edge cases where someone's name can be heavily overloaded (e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_L...)

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#114

Post by chongli » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

ardit33 wrote: post #93

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…

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

Those are trivial concepts though. The article brings up "perfectoid spaces", as if to suggest their superiority to "Scholze spaces", yet neither name gives any clue as to what they are:

In mathematics, perfectoid spaces are adic spaces of special kind, which occur in the study of problems of "mixed characteristic", such as local fields of characteristic zero which have residue fields of characteristic prime p.

A perfectoid field is a complete topological field K whose topology is induced by a nondiscrete valuation of rank 1, such that the Frobenius endomorphism Φ is surjective on K°/p where K° denotes the ring of power-bounded elements. [1]

Oh, okay. See, the problem is that modern mathematical structures are built on top of centuries of prior work. Computer science, on the other hand, is still in its infancy as a 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.

That's silly. Computer science is a subfield of math. All computer scientists working in research are mathematicians by training. You won't get anywhere at all if you try to enter the field without a mathematical background.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfectoid_space

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#115

Post by dr_hooo » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:32 PM UTC

ardit33 wrote: post #93

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…

Yet we still have Dijkstra's algorithm vs Belmann-Ford, because their differences cannot be captured well in a single word.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#116

Post by alpple » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

I think the optimal or universal language is more difficult in practice than in idealism. Reading is the art of sorting through the mess in any field, and acquiring context. I think a lot of this underestimates the complexity and nuance of language for any field.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#117

Post by jfoutz » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

ardit33 wrote: post #93

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…

Meanings of words drift over time, like, litterally.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#118

Post by FiberBundle » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

ardit33 wrote: post #93

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…

The mathematical objects mentioned in the article are way more abstract than something like a sorting algorithm. There aren't any words in our vocabulary which would concisely help to describe these concepts.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#119

Post by gnusty_gnurc » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:36 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…

I guess historians have an impossible job!

Having not read the article, is it possible she’s arguing the similar notion of erasing history because it’s psychologically unbearable for some people?

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#120

Post by abnry » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #101

abnry wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What's so toxic about honouring a long-dead mathematician? The article praises the Ancient Greeks and how they named things after their teachers. That, to me, is far more problematic. The history and the effort that went into developing the theorems of geometry presented by Euclid's Elements are all lost. Now we only know about Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes, and maybe a few others. On the other hand, we know far mor…

To me, learning the mathematics is more important than learning the history, although the history is very interesting.

As for long-dead mathematicians... theorems are still being named to this day for living people. I think the glory we attach to discoverer of the mathematics diminishes the glory of the mathematics.