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Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

nautil.us

171–180 of 406 posts

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#171
post #166
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cont…

Page rank. I thought git was named by Linus, and to the extent that it is named after him, it was self awareness of his reputation? I remember when Duff's Device was a neat trick; does anyone still use it these days? Edit: a neat trick, not a bear trick.

Speaking of Linus, did you know the embarrassingly invalid "Linus's Law" was actually made up by Eric S Raymond, and he just blamed it on Linus?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law

>In software development, Linus's law is the assertion that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".

>The law was formulated by Eric S. Raymond in his essay and book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999), and was named in honor of Linus Torvalds. [...]

>Validity

>In Facts and Fallacies about Software Engineering, Robert Glass refers to the law as a "mantra" of the open source movement, but calls it a fallacy due to the lack of supporting evidence and because research has indicated that the rate at which additional bugs are uncovered does not scale linearly with the number of reviewers; rather, there is a small maximum number of useful reviewers, between two and four, and additional reviewers above this number uncover bugs at a much lower rate.[4] While closed-source practitioners also promote stringent, independent code analysis during a software project's development, they focus on in-depth review by a few and not primarily the number of "eyeballs".[5]

>The persistence of the Heartbleed security bug in a critical piece of code for two years has been considered as a refutation of Raymond's dictum.[6][7][8][9] Larry Seltzer suspects that the availability of source code may cause some developers and researchers to perform less extensive tests than they would with closed source software, making it easier for bugs to remain.[9] In 2015, the Linux Foundation's executive director Jim Zemlin argued that the complexity of modern software has increased to such levels that specific resource allocation is desirable to improve its security. Regarding some of 2014's largest global open source software vulnerabilities, he says, "In these cases, the eyeballs weren't really looking".[8] Large scale experiments or peer-reviewed surveys to test how well the mantra holds in practice have not been performed.

>Empirical support to the validity of Linus’s law [10] was obtained by comparing popular and unpopular projects of the same organisation. Organizations like Google and Facebook are known for their quality standards. Popular projects are projects with in the top 5% number of stars (7,481 stars or more). The bug identification was measured using the corrective commit probability, ratio of commits detected to fixing bug. The analysis showed that the popular projects had more bug fixing ratio (e.g., Google’s popular projects had 27% higher bug fix rate than Google’s less popular projects). Since it is unlikely that Google lowered its quality standard in it most popular projects, this is an indication of increased bug detection efficiency in popular projects.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#173
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'…

> Taipei = north Tai

> Tainan = south Tai

> Taichung = middle Tai

> Taitung = east Tai

> Shandong = east mountains

> Shanxi = west mountains etc.

Not quite. Shandong = "east of the mountain(s)", not "the mountains in the east", and similarly for the others. Note how in Shandong, dong comes second, whereas in Beijing, the north capital, bei comes first.

Shanghai is a weird one. "On the sea" should be haishang. 上海 in another context should mean something like "get onto the sea".

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#174
Well, unless Hairy Ball Theorem is called after her, I don't think it's up to her to decide, what mathematicians "should" do. Jeez, these journalists researching "computational morality"...

To be fair, I do actually think some math jargon is unnecessarily complex and we could do better, and that it is something that actually matters. And I do think, for instance, that "commutative group" is better than "abelian group", since it is descriptive, unlike the latter. But this rarely is the culprit. Kähler manifold is called after Kähler, because he is the one who introduced such a thing, and we don't really have any better name to describe it. (And it wasn't Kähler who named it after himself too.) Can she propose a better name? I'm curious to hear it, but she conveniently skips that issue in her musings. If not, this whole argument of hers is just silly, as is thinking that "monster group" is a "cool name". It is not cool, it's rather awful, it's called that precisely because we don't have a clue WTF this thing is, and I sincerely hope that some 300 years later we'll have a much better understanding of group theory to rewrite all that stuff and to see that "monster group" is not such a "monster" after all, but quite a natural thing, that can be described conveniently and assigned some proper name.

So if we want to improve the landscape, let's rather start small, by abandoning π in favor of ½τ. Let's see how many centuries that will take.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#175

> 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…

Right, this is a ridiculous argument.

Wikipedia catalogues two different lists of eponyms in medicine: diseases and symptoms!

“Being awarded an eponym is regarded as an honor: "Eponymity, not anonymity, is the standard."”

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

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

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#176

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…

We should strive to remove all references to Teichmüller. It is abhorrent that the name of a prominent Nazi is so deeply embedded in modern mathematics.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#177
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There is no research anywhere, in any field, that has nothing to do with math.

Now this is most certainly wrong. Example (search "history research"):

"Research in history involves developing an understanding of the past through the examination and interpretation of evidence. Evidence may exist in the form of texts, physical remains of historic sites, recorded data, pictures, maps, artifacts, and so on."

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#178
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow, I know this isn't what you meant but wouldn't it be great if we could use literally and litterally to mean literally and figuratively??

Ha! And punish my poor spelling even more.

I thought you were making a valid point that spelling drifts too!

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#179

> 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…

Yeah, that didn't pass the laugh test.

My mother always joked you could tell that elastin got named by an assistant while the doctor was out sick.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#180
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…

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…

I'd call my sorting technique "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Sort" so it gets listed first in the algorithm directory.
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