Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

Post by Godel_unicode » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 8:04 PM UTC

jfoutz wrote: post #117

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…

Meanings of words drift over time, like, litterally.

Post by reaperducer » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 8:05 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'…

Post by Godel_unicode » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 8:06 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…

Post by detaro » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 8:06 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #138

Laakeri wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 back…

Post by shmel » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 8:07 PM UTC

kalium-xyz wrote: post #43

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"

I highly doubt this will work out well in the long term. Considering that once something new comes out with a similar name or even the word which was misspelled to form the name of some JS framework it will rise above in the search results.