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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

#231

Post by 29athrowaway »

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…

A few other favorites: Knuth shuffle, Levinshtein distance, Dijkstra's algorithm, Kruskal's algorithm, Kosajaru-Sharir algorithm, Bellman-Ford algorithm, Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm, Boyer-Moore algorithm, Rabin-Karp algorithm, Turing machines...

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#232

Post by 29athrowaway »

ben_w wrote: post #166
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…

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.

And PigeonRank™: https://archive.google.com/pigeonrank/

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#233

Post by jldugger »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #220
labster wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Presumably because these exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographic_filter

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#234

Post by sudosysgen »

Grustaf wrote: post #207
thaumasiotes wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

In any case, Shanghai is not the only seaside city and there are other porta as fragrant ad Hong Kong‘s.

Shanghai is the biggest seaside city and pretty sure Hong Kong for a long time was the principal port (wrt China, of course).

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#235

Post by tr352 »

ardit33 wrote: post #93
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 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…

> Event the name "Boolean", could be changed to "Conditional"... and be even more readable.

Definitely not. The term conditional is used for statements of the form “if X then Y”, in computer science as well as logic/philosophy.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#236

Post by dorchadas »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #40
superhuzza wrote: post #21

I actually agree with the author's premise, I think she makes a good case that some of these concepts would be both more approachable, and more memorable, with simpler names. However, coming up with simple names is incredibly difficult. It's easy to write a 10,000 word on a complicated topic, but incredibly difficult to squish it into a few letters.

And bad naming might even make things worse as the reader might get the wrong idea.

Or you end up with things like 'clopen' sets, which are both closed and open!

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#237

Post by User23 »

znpy wrote: post #226
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.

> Computer science is not a subfield of math. I wonder what Alan Turing would say about this. On more serious note... Most people confuse software engineering with computer science. Computer science is a branch of mathematics, software engineering might not be. Oh and by the way, there's a bunch of mathematics and logic (again, a branch or mathematics) into language recognition and compilers... Edit: think that many…

Dijkstra wrote extensively on how mathematically illiteracy among working programmers is why software is generally of such poor quality.

He grew up in a world where he could only beg an hour a week of compute time off the Americans so his community put a remarkably high emphasis on software quality and clear semantics.

And that’s really what advanced mathematics is all about: clearly communicating otherwise intractably complex ideas by letting the symbols do the work.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#238

Post by ezoe »

If it's unique name, it's fine. What I don't like it is math notations. Many math notations requires complex typesetting and layout which cannot be expressed in the plain text. It may be not much of a problem when math notations were written by hand, but not anymore in the age of computer.

The mathematicians should have invented and standardise the notation that can be expressed as the plaintext decades ago.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#239

Post by rocqua »

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…

The thing is, there is a trade-off between making math (at any level) accessible to outsiders, and making things easier for the heavy practitioners.

For naming things after their inventors, you are very much losing accessibility to outsides (that includes mathematicians working outside the field). I could see the trade-off for clarity (for most people) not being big enough to off-set the loss in accessibility. The easier a field is to get into, the quicker it will grow. Moreover, it also makes the field a lot more fruitful to work in.

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