181–190 of 406 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
This makes it hard to choose generic names from the get-go since the first person to use name might not attach it to the best concept for it, making it unavailable for the best concept for the name to describe.
-----
I've always imagined people's names in concept names to be a shorthand for the papers that defined them. Eg. "Calabi-yau manifold" is just another way to write "manifolds as described by calabi and Yau in " and importing all the detailed definitions from that paper. To get the same from properties from a generic name, you need to get a canonical definition that everyone agrees with
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Calling this narcissism does everyone a significant disservice. It’s not even really narcissism. Here’s the original paper describing what is now called Dijkstra’s Algorithm: http://www-m3.ma.tum.de/foswiki/pub/MN0506/WebHome/dijkstra.... Note that the algorithm isn’t called that anywhere in the paper. In fact, it’s not even named. When other people want to discuss that work, they need to call it something, and som…
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…
Rather, what really happens is that mathematicians are a community, and they refer to things in whatever way is convenient. Davis's colleague refers to such-and-such theorem as "Davis's Theorem" not because of some committee on naming, but rather because they were there at the conference where Davis announced the theorem, and everyone at said conference excitedly talked about "Davis's Theorem" for the whole rest of the conference because it was so exciting.
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…
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…
Unfortunately, we rely on idioms and made-up terms for lots of complicated concepts, but I don’t believe that narcissism is to blame. I believe the magnitude of the number of concepts we need to know about overall is gargantuan, so much so that words would get overloaded if we tried to describe everything accurately. Which would be more confusing than it is now.
Also, you’re assuming a minimum context of knowledge when you say something like “Shortest Path” is a better name for Djikstra’s algorithm. What if you don’t know what a graph is, or know what a graph is but don’t know what a path is? How is Shortest Path any less opaque? There’s no lowest common denominator of knowledge, so having agreed upon terms in a given domain is the only way to remain precise.
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…
I don't see how your example proves your point. It is not plausible to think about curvature when discussing triangles (you may discuss curvature of constructed circles, but that's tautological to the size of the circles...) so searching for "Steiner Curvature Point" should help find what you need faster.
As an aside, the Steiner curvature centroid has a perfectly reasonable interpretation in terms of the "curvature" of a triangle. For a convex set in the plane with smooth boundary, the Steiner curvature centroid is equal to the barycenter of the probability measure on the boundary weighted proportionally to the curvature. Given a triangle, take a sequence of smooth convex sets converging in Hausdorff metric to the triangle, and the limit of the Steiner points of these will converge to the following thing: the average of the vertices of the triangle weighted proportionally to pi - the angle. This is the analogue of the barycenter of the curvature-weighted perimeter for triangles.