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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

#321

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

Huh. When I learned about it in high school 30+ years ago, I didn't learn any background on the name and saw an (admittedly, always awkwardly strained, and I can't even clearly explain it to myself now) metaphor in which the interleaved lists were somehow the shells. I never thought it as clear of a metaphor as by bubblesort, but more descriptive than quicksort.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#322

Post by bobthepanda »

ehmmmmmmmm wrote: post #100
yongjik wrote: post #82

Meh, that's like saying it's so hard to remember San Francisco from San Jose from Mountain View from Palo Alto, why can't we just name them as Big Sea City, Big South City, Middle Town, and Expensive Town. I.e., it's a fake problem that only sounds plausible to outsiders - if you live in the Bay Area, then Mountain View being called Mountain View is the least of your problems in driving to Mountain View.

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'…

Most suburban areas will probably have been named to attract people buying property, rather than for any real reason otherwise.

Perhaps the biggest historical example of this is Greenland, whose name is said to have been chosen to attract more settlers to a place that is very cold in reality. (The corresponding bit that people like to tell, in which Iceland had its name sabotaged to make Greenland more attractive, is not based in reality.)

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#323

Post by sudosysgen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #295
sudosysgen wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shanghai is the biggest seaside city and pretty sure Hong Kong for a long time was the principal port (wrt China, of course).

> Shanghai is the biggest seaside city The name is much older than the size.

I'm guessing that at that point it was also the most notable one, or notable for the fact it was in the ses.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#324

Post by SubiculumCode »

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 can't think of a concise phrase that would capture a precise mathematical construct, while differentiating it from related constructs.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#325

Post by mr_toad »

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

It would be harder to search for, and to a lay person it still doesn’t explain what it is. Even worse, given the ambiguity of the word ‘normal’ it could easily cause misapprehensions. Ask the person on the street what normal noise is and they’re probably going to answer in decibels.

At least Gaussian noise is easily googled.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#326

Post by knome »

ben_w wrote: post #166
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…

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.

>I thought git was named by Linus

Yes, I included that one as a joke. "git" is a British slang term. Linus once quipped that he names all his projects after himself.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#327

Post by vertbhrtn »

This is some mediocre people came up with idea that they could easily understand what Calabi-Yau manifold is, if only mathematicians defined it with simple plain words. They don't like the idea that such a full definition would be 1000 pages long, full of complex concepts.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#328

Post by pacifika »

mr_toad wrote: post #325
elgenie wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It would be harder to search for, and to a lay person it still doesn’t explain what it is. Even worse, given the ambiguity of the word ‘normal’ it could easily cause misapprehensions. Ask the person on the street what normal noise is and they’re probably going to answer in decibels. At least Gaussian noise is easily googled.

The value in the understanding of the term is not in how searchable it is.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#329

Post by dllthomas »

xdavidliu wrote: post #317
thaumasiotes wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nagle's Algorithm is named after a person. It helps make sure more data is sent together, rather than split across unnecessarily many packets.

I recently learned that in Polish, "nagle" can mean "all at once" - not pronounced the same, but still a cute coincidence!

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#330

Post by afiori »

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…

In addition names have another huge accessibility advantage: they are easy to translate. using pedantic suffixes for precise meanings sometimes means that some languages run out of variants
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