Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 406 posts

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#301

Post by elgenie »

walrus01 wrote: post #271
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…

Very notably things like the Shannon-Hartley Theorem. Gaussian noise. The list in physics could go on for quite a long time. Terms like "gaussian noise" are used as short versions to describe something that would need an entire paragraph if described in a verbose way, as if the reader did not understand the fundamentals of the concept.

Calling “gaussian noise” “normal noise”, like the associated distribution, would not lose any precision

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#302

Post by GrantZvolsky »

ajmurmann wrote: post #130
ehmmmmmmmm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, although as a Mountain View resident I'm pretty disgruntled that there is neither mountain nor view here. A town like Mammoth Lakes, CA would be a better candidate to deserve the name "Mountain View". Jokes aside there are places in the world that name themselves much more intuitively like you described. Beijing = northern capital Nanjing = southern capital Shanghai = on the sea Hong Kong = fragrant harbor Xi'…

Many places, even in the West, were named after unique characteristics. Language changed though. I studied in a German town called Paderborn (we lovingly called it "Paderboring" though). A river called Pader originates there and the word "born" is old German for source or spring. Many other German towns have similar names that make sense in old German or are derived from Latin names that were more descriptive but nob…

Case in point: Pontefract*

The advantage of descriptive names is that the more you know, the more you can infer despite them being far removed from current language. On the other hand if there isn't a good candidate for a descriptive name, a surname-shaped nonce is better than a misnomer.

* Latin for Broken Bridge

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#303

Post by abnry »

woopwoop wrote: post #189
abnry wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how your example proves your point. It is not plausible to think about curvature when discussing triangles (you may discuss curvature of constructed circles, but that's tautological to the size of the circles...) so searching for "Steiner Curvature Point" should help find what you need faster.

But at the time I didn't know the phrase "Steiner curvature centroid", I just knew "Steiner point". The definition I knew was not in terms of the curvature, or in the terms I gave above, but as a certain integral of the support function. As an aside, the Steiner curvature centroid has a perfectly reasonable interpretation in terms of the "curvature" of a triangle. For a convex set in the plane with smooth boundary, t…

The thrust of the original article's point is that more descriptive names for theorems and definitions is better. "Steiner curvature centroid" is more descriptive than "Steiner Point", and by the metric of being able to Google for relevant information, it is indeed better.

I see now, rereading, that you were in fact making two points. First, that understanding the definition dwarfs learning the name. (I'd argue that a better name won't make you instantly understand a definition, but it can help but the very example of Steiner point vs Steiner curvature centroid.) Second, that sometimes multiple defintions and theorems are named for the same person, which causes confusion. So you were making a for-and-against argument.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#304

Post by mehrdadn »

kergonath wrote: post #244
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.

> '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.

We already have "left" and "right" Riemann sums...

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#305

Post by xxs »

iguy wrote: post #261
jameshart wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

Isn't Allen the inventor's name?

It is a brand name.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#306

Post by tazedsoul »

I’m not opposed to naming things after people. That said, I often suspect that the naming conventions and rituals of mathematicians (and sometimes physicists) serve as gatekeeping mechanisms that make life extra difficult for newcomers to a field while preserving the authority of current experts in a field by turning their history and duration of involvement into a more powerful resource than it probably deserves.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#307

Post by Cybiote »

detaro wrote: post #147
chongli wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for example: operating systems, programming languages, human computer interaction, etc. Those topics might seem to have nothing to do with math but all of their components have mathematical underpinnings. Algorithms, data structures, complexity theory, and even the physics of end-to-end latency, colour perception, etc. There probably are some people out there, working in these fields with only a high school math back…

Everyone who completed a physics degree has done at least as much math as a CS degree holder, is physics a subfield of math? (I think there is a discussion to be had about making the distinction "CS" vs "theoretical CS" as the GP comment does, or if it should be "CS" vs some other term ("computing"? feels a bit general))

There is the Curry Howard Lambek Correspondence (or should I say: the Types, Logic, Cartesian Closed Category Correspondence). Curry Howard in particular, says the act of providing a term for a type is the same as providing the proof to a theorem (modulo a few details). Note that this isn't the same as saying writing a concrete computer program and proving a theorem in a type theory are the same type of activity.

Numerical methods and algorithms are fields of math as old as geometry, especially if we focus on the Babylonian or Chinese styles.

Hermann Grassmann sought to formalize arithmetic, not wishing to assume them as granted. In doing this, he also connects recursion, induction and the natural numbers (he would have known of recursion from its early application in the theory of combinatorics). Peano, Dedekind, Frege, Zermelo and many others would also work on the foundations and axiomatization of mathematics and deduction. Computing began as a side-effect of attempts to formalize just how far such an approach could be taken. The Turing Machine arose to tackle Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem. The lambda calculus as an approach to the foundation of mathematics. Functional programming languages were originally part of tools meant to study formal mathematical objects while Logic programming sought to apply ideas from formal logic and the axiomatization of mathematics to automatically search for programs.

Dedekind said: "In speaking of arithmetic (algebra, analysis) as a part of logic I mean to imply that I consider the number-concept entirely independent of notions or intuitions of space and time, that I consider it an immediate result from the laws of thought."

What we find is computing reaches right to the foundations of mathematics. Whenever we try to systemize thought, we end up with ideas which seeming inevitably also lead to the foundation of computation.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#308

Post by ineedasername »

This is not a naming problem. In fact the naming is consistent: There's a base-case "manifold". Another one build on top of it; another one build on top of that second one, etc.

This is precisely how knowledge is built, one thing on top of another. Naming would not have solved this "manifold" issue, in fact in would have obscured the root of that bit of knowledge.

In short, the author's real problem isn't names, is that they don't fully appreciate the way knowledge is built with ever more complex layers of abstraction.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#309

Post by tazedsoul »

Also, naming things is hard. If the things you are naming are specific concepts, and the conclusions reachable by reasoning about such concepts are highly sensitive; that is highly dependent upon such specificity, then the problem of naming things is even harder. I think this may be because what is hard about mathematics is the degree to which specificity matters. The names are just pointers to ideas, and these ideas are often unique but similar to one another, with differences that matter. It’s as if in naming a mathematical concept we are performing a compression algorithm on an object of great detail. A loss of information is expected. Of course, this process is an art form. Are some names easier to remember than others? Are there good names? Bad names? Of course. But I do think generalizing that “naming ideas based off people is bad” to all cases is a bad idea — rather a mixed approach is fruitful.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#310

Post by crazygringo »

ABCLAW wrote: post #245
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 weste…

See, you're actually making my point. ;)

Social contract theory is known as contractarianism. [1] (And the source was first Plato, but is best known through Hobbes. Rousseau was then the next best-known iteration after Hobbes.)

But "contractualism" is generally used to refer to T.M. Scanlon's theory specifically. [2]

This is my point. They're too easy to mix up. ;)

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractarianism/

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractualism/

Post reply on HN