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

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#121

Post by dragonwriter » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:37 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... etc...

And in quicksort, we have Hoare’s and Lomuto’s partition schemes. Not that “quicksort” is actually particularly descriptive.

We also have Timsort.

> Even the name "Boolean", could be changed to "Conditional"... and be even more readable

Booleans aren't conditionals, conditionals in crisp binary (or, as it is commonly known, “Boolean”) logic operate on booleans (conditionals in fuzzy or nonbinary crisp logics do not.)

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#122

Post by xrisk » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #114

ardit33 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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",…

> You won’t get anywhere at all if you try to enter the field without a mathematical background.

Unnecessary gatekeeping. There’s a lot of engineering-oriented research that has nothing to do with math.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#123

Post by bsza » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC

tareqak wrote: post #112

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?

What about it? It is just pure luck that Larry Page happens to have the perfect name for the algorithm named after him. Doesn't happen to everyone.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#124

Post by knome » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:40 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…

Tim Sort, Hamming Codes, Huffman Coding, RSA keys, LZW encoding, Duff's Device, Bloom Filter, Carmack's Reverse, awk, linux, git. We have a lot of things named after those that discovered, invented or popularized a structure or technique. Certainly nowhere near as commonly as does mathematics, I will agree.

In CS, no doubt, we often end up on the other end, where a single term means different things in different contexts and beginners may get confused at our reuse of terminology. Often the reuse gives some metaphorical understanding to the newcomer, even if it largely leads them astray in the details.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#125

Post by Laakeri » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #114

ardit33 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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",…

Computer science is not a subfield of math. Theoretical computer science is, but there is a lot more to cs than just tcs, for example: operating systems, programming languages, human computer interaction, etc.

I agree on your first point though, I think the concepts named after people are usually so abstract that the hard part is to really understand the concepts, not to remember the name.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#126

Post by mattkrause » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:44 PM UTC

dheera wrote: post #33

My 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 tr…

You could just write out “Hamiltonian {operator, path, system, etc}, but it’s not uncommon for adjective+nouns to be shortened to just the adjective when it’s obvious from context.

If you want good Italian [food], you might ask an Italian [person] to translate some Italian [text] you saw in a restaurant review.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#127

Post by csours » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:44 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…

I ran into something like this with Perrow's 'Normal Accidents' - he defines common words with specific meanings, when he could have just as easily used two common words with no ambiguity.

If you use three words, you're in real danger of forming acronyms, but I think two words are a sweet spot.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#128

Post by moomin » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:45 PM UTC

If you think plain English words help with this, try either explaining what a compact space is or a normal subgroup. Or, if you don’t know, figure it out from the descriptions on the internet.

And these are not hard concepts as far as maths goes.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#129

Post by bmurray7jhu » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:46 PM UTC

David Hilbert was so prolific that one of his eponymous theorems was also numbered: Hilbert's Theorem 90.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#130

Post by ajmurmann » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:48 PM UTC

ehmmmmmmmm wrote: post #100

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'…

Many places, even in the West, were named after unique characteristics. Language changed though. I studied in a German town called Paderborn (we lovingly called it "Paderboring" though). A river called Pader originates there and the word "born" is old German for source or spring. Many other German towns have similar names that make sense in old German or are derived from Latin names that were more descriptive but nobody understands anymore.

In the USA there are many places like that as well and it's more obvious, since language hasn't changed since they were named. Ironically the landscape has due to human doing in many cases. Think Thousand Oaks, Walnut Creek, Mill Valley

A sibling post makes the argument that descriptive names would eventually lose the descriptively as language changes. This is very much validated by the German names. However, that took hundreds if not over a thousand years in some cases.