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Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

nautil.us

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Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#191

Post by Grustaf »

The fact that mathematics honors the people that built it is one of the things I love the most about it.

But speaking practically, it’s by far the beat option in many cases. There might be a small number of basic concepts (like dodecahedron or inverse) that can be given actually descriptive names, but for anything even slightly complex it’s impossible, so we end up with a mixture of almost nonsensical and often confusing “descriptive” names, and concepts named after people.

Is it harder to remember and distinguish “Hamiltonian”, “Dirac delta” or “Lagranian” than “cohomology”, “homomorphic” and “homeomorphic”?

Having said that, in many cases the names are quite evocative, like “fibre-bundle”.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#192

Post by yongjik »

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'…

In the same vein, Seoul = "capital". It used to be a correct expression to say "the Seoul of North Korea is Pyongyang," in Korean. These days I guess it will draw weird looks.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#193

Post by kergonath »

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…

You can have only so many Riemann theorems before it becomes confusing, though.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#194

Post by taeric »

dragonwriter wrote: post #105
i_cannot_hack wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I agreed with you, but I think your analogy to algorithms actually somewhat counters your point. The Wikipedia article for Dijkstra's algorithm gives an alternative name of "Shortest Path First", or "SPF algorithm", which I do think is a much better and more descriptive name. It also made me think of sorting algorithms, which all have wonderfully snappy and descriptive names. I think the world would be a sad…

> It also made me think of sorting algorithms, which all have wonderfully snappy and descriptive names.@@ Well, bubble, shell, insertion and merge, sure. Quick less so. And then there is Tim...

You do know that Shell is a name, right?

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#195

Post by labster »

knome wrote: post #124
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…

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…

Bloom filters prove OP’s point though. The first few times I heard the term, I wondered how a Photoshop filter to blur things could possibly apply to the problem. Maybe if it was called an exclusion filter it would be less jargony, I don’t know; naming things is hard.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#196

Post by amw-zero »

Laakeri wrote: post #125
chongli wrote: post #114

Earlier 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.

All of the important ideas in all of the fields that you mentioned have an absolute foundation in math. Just because we are able to work without using math everyday does not reduce the relevance of math to programming at all.

Programming is math. I’m not sure why this bothers people so much. When you cross a bridge and it’s able to keep standing, you don’t feel gratitude to math? When you write any program, you should feel the same gratitude.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#197

Post by Grustaf »

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",…

Well, CS is more like an extension of a very tiny corner of maths. And practically speaking, most computer scientists and 99% of programmers are terrible at math, to the point that they don’t even genuinely understand basic undergraduate concepts from linear algebra.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#198

Post by krick »

WoahNoun wrote: post #186
krick wrote: post #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…

A Kahler manifold is just a complex manifold with both a Riemann metric and a sympletic (Hamiltonian) form. It's not a rare class of manifolds and while the "adjective" Kahler has come to mean those properties. Why not call it a Reimann-Hamilton manifold if we care so much about the "history"?

> Kähler manifold is a bad name, stop naming things after each other!

> Why not call it a Reimann-Hamilton manifold

I'm not sure if this is top-notch sarcasm or not, but I'll upvote just to be safe.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#200

Post by Nesco »

jmeister wrote: post #87
petermcneeley wrote: post #31

We 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.

Even if it were the hidden objective, the arguments given are still pretty convincing
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