>Polish Mathematicians never getting things named after them because their names were too hard to spell
Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
251–260 of 406 posts
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#252Hard 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…
[c]onditional and Boolean both have meanings, and they are not the same.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#253Earlier 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."
I'm pretty sure modern historians use a lot of mathematical tools: statistics, information science, digital archives, computer imaging, etc. It's very hard to search for this, though, because all of the results concern the history of mathematics. You have to examine the tools and methods used.
Pretty much every field in the social sciences and humanities requires their undergrads to take at least one course in statistics. Sure, these students may complain about it but they need to be trained to not make common statistical errors in their publications. Unfortunately, they still do, which highlights the importance of mathematical education even in these fields.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#254Earlier 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",…
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.
Working computer scientists (academics) are definitely not terrible at math. There are a great deal of complicated proofs involved in areas such as complexity theory, algorithms, and data structures. Their jobs are not altogether different from those of mathematicians.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#255Earlier 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…
To some extent that reflects that in programming we encounter a mixture of naming origins between computer science (where naming follows an academic tradition that shares its heritage with Mathematics) and software engineering (where naming follows a tradition closer to that of other engineering tooling, where naming is more like branding - think 'Duck tape' or 'Allen wrench').
Often the closest thing we do to the whole 'Thurston maps are Thurston-equivalent to polynomials, unless they have Thurston obstructions' thing is that we qualify our statements about programming entities by the programming language or platform to which the statement applies. So you might reasonably have a statement like 'A JSON value consists of an array of JSON values, a map of string keys to JSON values, or a primitive value', which sounds just as self-referential as the Thurston example, but because it's called a JSON value, not a Crockford value, it sounds less conceited.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#256Earlier 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…
or acronyms.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#257Earlier 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.
I mean long class names in Java in particular are pretty much a meme [1] because of how ridiculous they are. There is definitely a balance to be struck between succinctness and expressiveness.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#258The pattern of using eponyms instead of descriptives is
also recognized in medicine: https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2020/01/30/eponym-debate-the-...
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 intractab…
> mathematically illiteracy
I rather enjoyed that!
I think there's truth to it though, even at as high a level of situations where you have logic that leaves you thinking 'ok, this works... but it doesn't actually make sense' where something's hard to understand or debug because it's got tangled up into a functional but illegible mess.
Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 shoul…
Is baseball also a subfield of math? The problem of swinging the bat can be reduced to physiology, which can be reduced to physics, and then to math. (Sorry for the snarkiness -- reductio ad absurdum just seems like the easiest way to argue this point.)
Baseball's development had nothing to do with math.
Engineering is not a subfield of math either, it merely uses math as a tool. As a field, engineering evolved in parallel with math, only borrowing mathematical methods when their suitable applications were discovered.
Computer Science is a subfield of math because it was developed by mathematicians as a direct descendent of algebra and the study of algorithms, which date back to the ancient Babylonian and Greek methods for division, computing the GCD of two numbers, finding square roots, etc.