The focus on mathematicians naming things (possibly for legacy) seems similar to the politicians venerating each others with statues.
And of course... naming remains one of the hardest things to do in any field.
Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
131–140 of 406 posts
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#132Hard 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…
terms like "quick sort" and "map" are actively harmful because what they mean is VERY ambiguous, and in some cases becomes wrong over time. "quick sort" is no longer the quickest sort algorithm by any standard, it happens to just be quicker than some of the algorithms that came before it. "map" tells you nothing about the properties of the data structure other than that it 'maps' keys to values, but even the nuances of that could vary (can you have duplicate keys? duplicate values? do the keys have to be non-null?)
"Boolean" and "conditional" are semantically very different, the difference is significant.
The "there can be more than one" is specifically why it's important to call the algorithm Dijkstra. It's possible to look it up in Google or in a textbook and immediately find the algorithm in question. Generic terms don't have that property.
Calling this narcissism does everyone a significant disservice.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
So how would you solve it?
I imagine they work around the direct reference issue by having good search algorithms.
I guess. I wanted to know what kind of corporate wiki / database is a good choice for storing / retrieving human-readable, verbose information about servers or services.
My current employer uses atlassian confluence for that. So if you don't know what is this server "potato1" with 7 docker containers for, you can type "potato1" in confluence and hopefully get an answer.
Maybe in big companies they use homebrew solutions for this
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#134Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#135We 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
I came here to make the same comment so I’ll be the explainer: It’s about erasing white male names/dominance/influence/privilege/?? from math history.
This is a classical example of attacking the very weakest form of one's arguments. Not even addressing the content in the article, but fabricating a strawman instead. I mean, good on ya for speaking up, your parent just spoke in vague terms about the possible existence of a strawman.
And let's look at that pg article. Is discussing the ergonomics of naming things in math taboo? Is it taboo for everybody, or just people of certain demographics?
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#136Hard 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…
I’m not sure there’s a huge difference between fields: CS also has AVL trees and the RSA algorithm (both named after inventors), red-black trees (mnemonic, maybe, but not descriptive), and B-Trees (Boeing? Balance, Bayer? No one knows, not even the creators —- see 16:10 here https://vimeo.com/73481096)
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#137The alternative is common words meaning different things, depending on field or specialty. Case in point: Entropy
Which is actually helpful because it potentially helps build bridges and analogies between fields by recognizing similar constructs?
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
for example: operating systems, programming languages, human computer interaction, etc.
Those topics might seem to have nothing to do with math but all of their components have mathematical underpinnings. Algorithms, data structures, complexity theory, and even the physics of end-to-end latency, colour perception, etc.
There probably are some people out there, working in these fields with only a high school math background, but I'd imagine they're exceedingly rare. Anyone who's completed a CS degree has done their fair share of math.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#139Hard 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…
You could also generalize the person name "algorithm" with "method for solving things" and it would be more readable.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#140This 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…
I think that even an arbitrary name (e.g. quark colors blue, green, red) is easier to digest/process/memorize over a person’s name that may be from a language you are not familiar with. However that also points to another problem. How do you translate? Do you force the word from the discover’s language on all other languages or do you translate it? If you translate then you are introducing drift but if you don’t translate then the word is just as effective as a foreign name. It’s almost like you would have to come up with a table for the concept in all common languages. So while names suck I don’t know what would be better.