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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

#211

Post by m12k »

labster wrote: post #195
knome wrote: 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…

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.

I was telling a friend about Bloom filters and he'd never looked into them, because he'd assumed from the name that they were some kind of screen space shader.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#212

Post by mattkrause »

rrobukef wrote: post #184
mattkrause wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It is also introduced as Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm if the text is expected to be read outside the domain such as in textbooks.

Sure, but

a) It'd need to be called that by Dijkstra himself to be even arguably narcissistic and

b) The qualifier "Dijsktra's" is important because there are other algorithms for finding a shortest path (Bellman-Ford, Floyd-Warshall, A*), with different trade-offs (Bellman-Ford is slower, but can handle negative weights; Floyd-Warshall gets you all pairs and may be better when the graph is dense). Accordingly, I think the grandparent's suggestion of purely descriptive names isn't feasible.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#213

Post by Grustaf »

saithound wrote: post #50

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…

Is learning the names of the concepts the problem for non-math undergraduates? I’d say that’s the only part that doesn’t give them headaches. Remembering peoples’ names is something we practice every day, understanding abstract mathematical concepts on the underhand is very painful for most people.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#214

Post by DonHopkins »

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…

I love how they named the inverse spectrum the cepstrum, which uses quefrency, saphe, alanysis, and liftering, instead of frequency, phase, analysis and filtering. It should not be confused with the earlier concept of the kepstrum, of course! ;)

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

>References to the Bogert paper, in a bibliography, are often edited incorrectly. The terms "quefrency", "alanysis", "cepstrum" and "saphe" were invented by the authors by rearranging some letters in frequency, analysis, spectrum and phase. The new invented terms are defined by analogies to the older terms.

>Thus: The name cepstrum was derived by reversing the first four letters of "spectrum". Operations on cepstra are labelled quefrency analysis (aka quefrency alanysis[1]), liftering, or cepstral analysis. It may be pronounced in the two ways given, the second having the advantage of avoiding confusion with "kepstrum", which also exists (see below). [...]

>The kepstrum, which stands for "Kolmogorov-equation power-series time response", is similar to the cepstrum and has the same relation to it as expected value has to statistical average, i.e. cepstrum is the empirically measured quantity, while kepstrum is the theoretical quantity. It was in use before the cepstrum.[12][13]

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#215

Post by WoahNoun »

krick wrote: post #198
WoahNoun wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not suggesting that name. I'd prefer it was called a symplectic smooth inner product manifold. I'm merely pointing out the hypocrisy of the "name it after the discoverer argument"

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#216

Post by Tainnor »

bsza wrote: post #108
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…

People's names can be confused too. A few weeks ago I referred to the Legendre symbol as "Lagrange symbol" by mistake when talking to a colleague. Such things are inevitable however you name things; some words happen to have small Levenshulme-distances...

Lagrange vs. Legendre is kinda really easy to mix up, since you have Legendre polynomials and Lagrange polynomials and both are important in numerical analysis...

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#217

Post by kergonath »

Davidzheng wrote: post #161
kxyvr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, I've a Ph.D in math and I largely agree with the article. Frankly, it's difficult enough to keep track of the names in my own field much less interact with people in other fields who would greatly benefit from these results if they were comprehensible. While I agree that precision is necessary, is it really that hard to say something like a complete inner product space vs a Hilbert space? Should we…

If you have to write complete inner product space a hundred times in an article that's pretty annoying tbh

In a Physics article, we'd just call it CIPS after the first instance. It does get a bit unwieldy if there are too many acronyms or initialisms in a sentence.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#220

Post by quickthrower2 »

labster wrote: post #195
knome wrote: 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…

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.

And conversely why are photoshop filters even called filters!
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