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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

#281

Post by bjd2385 »

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…

Ugh I feel both sides.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#282

Post by srtjstjsj »

bsza wrote: post #99
archgoon wrote: post #13

Yep; check out how the programming community does it! We have descriptive names for things like "Apache", "React", "nginx", "Rust", and "Java"!

These are names for products though, not programming concepts. A more accurate analogy would be calling a class a Kay template or calling a for loop a Lovelace construct. And it's great that we don't do that.

Lucky us, we have Booleans, Turing Machines, Bolzmann machines, Markov Chains, Liskov Substitution Principle, ISO 8601 dates, the MIT and BSD licenses (hat-tip to the GPL), and the wholly ambiguous concept of a "class" or "object-orientation"

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#283

Post by srtjstjsj »

kalium-xyz wrote: post #43
neutronicus wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because "easy to google" is much more important in the short, medium, and long runs than "easy to guess what it does"

I highly doubt this will work out well in the long term. Considering that once something new comes out with a similar name or even the word which was misspelled to form the name of some JS framework it will rise above in the search results.

In the long term, nothing works, because the universe is larger than the language center of the human brain.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#284

Post by dlubarov »

chongli wrote: post #260
dlubarov wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems kind of strange to me to draw the lines based on anthropology. If there was alternate universe in which a philospher with no mathematical training invented Turing machines and so forth, would you consider CS a subfield of math in one universe but not the other?

Your classification seems as reasonable as any, but the lines seem fairly arbitrary to me.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#285

Post by hcs »

8note wrote: post #139
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…

You could also generalize the person name "algorithm" with "method for solving things" and it would be more readable.

Not sure if this is what you meant, but this reminded me that "algorithm" is ultimately named after a mathematician https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#286

Post by hcs »

dragonwriter wrote: post #121
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... etc... And in quicksort, we have Hoare’s and Lomuto’s partition schemes. Not that “quicksort” is actually particularly descriptive. We also have Timsort. > Even the name "Boolean", could be changed to "Conditional"... and be even more readable Booleans aren't conditionals, conditionals in crisp binary (or, as it i…

> We also have Timsort.

And Shellsort!

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#287

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#288

Post by BluSyn »

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…

Could not possible disagree more. "Contractualism" is far easier to remember for most people than remembering the name "Scanlon". Proper names do NOT easily translate to concepts for majority of people. If you can't properly define your concept without the use of a proper name, you aren't trying hard enough.

I think this trend needs to die, and luckily it seems to be falling out of favor.

Similar to naming companies after the founder. Tesla Motors could easily have been "Musk Motors" if it was started in the era of Ford and Lockheed.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#289

Post by dllthomas »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #264
Godel_unicode wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow, I know this isn't what you meant but wouldn't it be great if we could use literally and litterally to mean literally and figuratively??

We can, but everyone uses literally to mean litterally.

A digression, but I don't think this is actually the case.

I readily acknowledge that literally is often used when a sentence is figurative; that's not the same thing. For literally to be used to mean figuratively the utterer would be worried that, but for the presence of "literally", the sentence might be understood to be literal.

I contend that the role "literally" usually plays is that of an intensifier. I believe it plays that role through ordinary application of hyperbole: the utterance "X is literally Y" is usually meant as "X is very Y; X is so Y it is almost as if it were literally Y; but of course you understand that it was not, in fact, literally Y - we're all reasonable people here."

In much the same way, when someone says "You left me waiting for days" and it's been a handful of minutes, we don't say "'days' sometimes means 'minutes'" - we say that people exaggerate.

I recognize that I'm disagreeing with at least one dictionary; I believe they got it wrong.

And I won't claim that there is literally no single person who in fact uses "literally" to mean "figuratively" - but I have never encountered such an example and I believe it to be rare enough that we can consider it an error, even in a descriptivist treatment.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#290

Post by ENGNR »

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…

I still sometimes forget that currying is named after a person, thinking there’s some analogy to composing arguments as if they’re ingredients
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