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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

#241

Post by ben0x539 »

xigency wrote: post #225
Davidzheng wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Terrible excuse. Things are read much more than they are written. That’s like using short variable names rather than descriptive ones as they are easier to type. With current IDEs that isn’t even the case and I’m sure word processors could use the same autocomplete. Every writing shortcut adds cognitive load for the reader to remember.

Short variable names can be easier to read, too. Having people decode meaning from the name, rather than keeping track of the meaning separately and associating it with a symbolic name, doesn't always feel like a good use of cognitive resources.

imo, "Hilbert space" is a lot easier to read, you really only have to recognize the guy's name, it's a fairly easily recognizable word. "Complete inner product space" has me look more closely at more words, and it's all extremely boring-looking words so they don't even stand out in a block of text.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#242

Post by palae »

Grustaf wrote: post #191

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 confu…

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

While I agree with your overall point, I must note that you did write Lagranian instead of Lagrangian ;)

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#243

Post by livre »

montjoy wrote: post #140
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…

I think that even an arbitrary name (e.g. quark colors blue, green, red) is easier to digest/process/memorize over a person’s name that may be from a language you are not familiar with. However that also points to another problem. How do you translate? Do you force the word from the discover’s language on all other languages or do you translate it? If you translate then you are introducing drift but if you don’t tran…

I think you make a great argument with the translation problem. English is a second language for me, and many of the people that studied with me at university didn't speak it at all so clases were as much in Spanish as it was possible. Things like "bubble sort" where translated to things like "ordenamiento de burbuja," etc. There were two problems with that: one is that not all authors used the same translation and second is that information in non English languages tends to be more outdated or not even exist at all on the web so many times I had to try and guess the right name in English when I wanted to understand something better.

Now that I have a job a similar problem appeared with translations, Microsoft has this annoying habit of translating useful technical error messages and many times the error in Spanish doesn't yield any useful information on Google searches (if at all) so I'm again having to guess-translate terms into their original form.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#244

Post by kergonath »

mehrdadn wrote: post #11

Not sure how feasible or necessary this is in general, but there are certainly some places for improvement. Some more modern examples than "isosceles": - Heaviside function → step function (edit: though maybe this one is, amusingly, already descriptive by accident?) - Fourier domain → frequency domain While I'm here, just a couple suggestions from me: - Markov chain → memoryless chain - Lebesgue integral → horizontal…

I have seen 'reciprocal space' used for 'Fourier space'. It is quite descriptive, and has the advantage of also working with Legendre transforms.

'Horizontal integrals' does not work. It refers to one way of visualising functions (and even then, only of 1 or 2 variables, and only with specific conventions), and not to the integral itself.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#245

Post by ABCLAW »

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…

>Areas like philosophy and law actually suffer in my opinion when they overload common words

It's more that people take material from our fields and misuse them in casual contexts.

>If "contractualism" were just known as "Scanlon's theory" it would be a lot easier.)

It would also be wrong as it isn't his theory, he's just a philosopher with a recent in-vogue formulation of it. The source of the theory in modern western philosophy is Rousseau. There's no issue with discussing "Scanlon's theories"; but that term refers to his theories, not contractualism at large.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#246

Post by guerrilla »

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…

> Areas like philosophy and law actually suffer in my opinion when they overload common words with uncommon meanings,

This is definitely true. It doesn't matter as much as a technical person learning it but at a certain point it becomes absolutely impossible to communicate with regular people not steeped in the terminology about it (e.g. object, property, event, part, substance, sort, kind, type for analytic ontology).

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#247

Post by mleonhard »

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.

Exclusion Set

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#248

Post by Trombone12 »

jldugger wrote: post #233
quickthrower2 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And conversely why are photoshop filters even called filters!

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

The point being made is that photoshop manipulates matrices and filters are circles made of translucent material you put on your camera; and in fact many of those photographic filters don't primarily filter light but rather distorts it in some desired fashion. "Transformations" would be much more accurate.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#249

Post by ammers »

DonHopkins wrote: post #171
ben_w wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Organizations like Google and Facebook are known for their quality standards.

Citation needed, especially for Facebook. The parts I saw are full of vile hacks, committed by an endless stream of new clueless devs --- young developers are of course better by the dictum of Mark Zuckerberg. I'm curious how his code looks or if he ever wrote anything substantial.

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