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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

#311

Post by zeroimpl »

i_cannot_hack wrote: post #79
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…

At first I agreed with you, but I think your analogy to algorithms actually somewhat counters your point. The Wikipedia article for Dijkstra's algorithm gives an alternative name of "Shortest Path First", or "SPF algorithm", which I do think is a much better and more descriptive name. It also made me think of sorting algorithms, which all have wonderfully snappy and descriptive names. I think the world would be a sad…

quicksort kind of proves that the names don't have to be particularly meaningful, just somewhat descriptive and unique. It's not like mergesort isn't quick.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#312

Post by eximius »

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…

The OPs point did point out that accessibility becomes less important in advanced topics. The things you've mentioned are largely elementary computer science concepts so they're both more amenable to descriptive naming and more important to have that.

Consider coming up with a descriptive name for LLL basis reduction (where LLL is the initials of the 3 authors) or some other advanced algorithm.

Someone more educated in CS might be able to give better examples.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#313

Post by sriku »

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.

At least having a word like "filter" in it narrows down the choices even if it doesn't make it unique. If instead it was "Bloom's construction" or "Bloom's algorithm", or "Tim's procedure", we'll be at a total loss to even guess what it was about, which is what happens with a lot of math starting from "Pythagorus theorem", anyone instantly recall "Apollonius' theorem", "Ackerman function", "Euler's function"?. If "Fermat's last theorem" or "Goldbach conjectures" weren't crazy famous I wouldn't have a clue.. The request to at least give us a "Fourier transform", if not "frequency spectrum" is not unreasonable.

I've lamented this for a long time, but on the other side, I doubt if mathematicians would ever get sufficient recognition if their names weren't immortalized thus, since they can't get patents on their works. They totally deserve recognition. Would you even remember Leonard Euler if his work was named factually? Most of us I guess have no idea who came up with sin/cos/exp/log etc. I'm glad for the names of these functions, but lament the loss of knowledge about the one (or many) who discovered them.

Longer names are a candidate .. along the lines of "Einstein's theory of general relativity". "Euler's relative prime counting function" .. but they too will likely, depending on familiarity, collapse over time.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#314

Post by a1369209993 »

elgenie wrote: post #301
walrus01 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What does gaussian noise have to do with a vector that points orthogonal to a surface? (Not entirely rhetorical; it'd be interesting if there was a relation there.)

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#315

Post by magicalhippo »

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!

I always presumed it came from signal processing[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_(signal_processing)

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#316

Post by xdavidliu »

zeroimpl wrote: post #311
i_cannot_hack wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I agreed with you, but I think your analogy to algorithms actually somewhat counters your point. The Wikipedia article for Dijkstra's algorithm gives an alternative name of "Shortest Path First", or "SPF algorithm", which I do think is a much better and more descriptive name. It also made me think of sorting algorithms, which all have wonderfully snappy and descriptive names. I think the world would be a sad…

quicksort kind of proves that the names don't have to be particularly meaningful, just somewhat descriptive and unique. It's not like mergesort isn't quick.

pivotsort would have been a better name

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#317

Post by xdavidliu »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #299
dragonwriter wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also made me think of sorting algorithms, which all have wonderfully snappy and descriptive names.@@ Well, bubble, shell, insertion and merge, sure. Quick less so. And then there is Tim...

What? Shell sort isn't a descriptive name. The algorithm is named after Donald Shell, and has nothing to do with shells.

kind of reminds me of the Heaviside function, which is a step function. When I first learned about it in school, I thought it was named after the "heavy side" on the right, as opposed to the "light side" on the left. Turns out that Oliver Heaviside was an actual person.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#318

Post by a1369209993 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #173
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'…

> 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…

> 上海 in another context should mean something like "get onto the sea".

Wait, does that mean that "shanghaiing" someone is actually a literal description rather than just a reference to a prototypical destination?

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#319

Post by magicalhippo »

gnodar wrote: post #14
aaron-santos wrote: post #7

The lack of eponymous names used in category theory, for example, do nothing to aid in learning it. The term functor is no more descriptive than Carnap mapping.

No more descriptive, but IMO more memorable.

If it's not descriptive, then memorable is a good substitute.

Been many years since I went to uni and haven't used much of the math since, but I still recall the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, what the Kronecker product is and how to do Taylor expansion.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#320

Post by labster »

sriku wrote: post #313
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.

At least having a word like "filter" in it narrows down the choices even if it doesn't make it unique. If instead it was "Bloom's construction" or "Bloom's algorithm", or "Tim's procedure", we'll be at a total loss to even guess what it was about, which is what happens with a lot of math starting from "Pythagorus theorem", anyone instantly recall "Apollonius' theorem", "Ackerman function", "Euler's function"?. If "Fe…

Do they get recognition? I’m an atmospheric scientist, and though I’ve used the equations many, many times, I have no idea who Navier-Stokes was. Or maybe they were two people? Whatever. Presumably they invented the equations and were scientists or mathematicians or something. If real recognition only comes from inside the field, everyone else has pedagogically unuseful name to deal with.
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