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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

#331

Post by jimmaswell »

knome wrote: post #124
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…

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…

The absolute worst is some thing I can't remember the real name of right now - I thought it was generic programming but it doesn't seem to be it. It doesn't connotate the meaning in the slightest, and even connotated something other than what it was. It was just storing a matrix or array of past return values of a function to reuse. It feels like I'm having a Mandella moment.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#332

Post by ajuc »

jimmaswell wrote: post #331
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…

The absolute worst is some thing I can't remember the real name of right now - I thought it was generic programming but it doesn't seem to be it. It doesn't connotate the meaning in the slightest, and even connotated something other than what it was. It was just storing a matrix or array of past return values of a function to reuse. It feels like I'm having a Mandella moment.

You probably mean dynamic programming. I agree the name is awful.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#333

Post by afiori »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #182
i-am-curious wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Taking a very obvious example, you can't do much in the way of historical research without at least trying to establish which things happened before which other things. It's a serious problem in ancient history.

but you can do that without any math background, for sure there are applications of math in history research but they are just applications

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#334

Post by jkaptur »

jimmaswell wrote: post #331
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…

The absolute worst is some thing I can't remember the real name of right now - I thought it was generic programming but it doesn't seem to be it. It doesn't connotate the meaning in the slightest, and even connotated something other than what it was. It was just storing a matrix or array of past return values of a function to reuse. It feels like I'm having a Mandella moment.

Memoization? Or dynamic programming? The latter is a funny story:

> ... Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities.

http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/~ami/cd/or50/1526-5463-2002-50-01-0...

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#335

Post by afiori »

ogogmad wrote: post #209
dr_hooo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet we still have Dijkstra's algorithm vs Belmann-Ford, because their differences cannot be captured well in a single word.

Hmm. Dijkstra = Nearest Node First, Bellman-Ford = Shortest k-Edge Path.

at this point in time it is probably a better idea to simply list both dijkstra and bellman-ford in a wikipedia page for optimal path finding algorithm

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#336

Post by yellowapple »

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…

> Once you get to the advanced levels of any field, terminology being "accessible" doesn't really matter, but being precise does.

And in what multiverse is "Calabi-Yau manifold" a precise terminology? Literally all that can be gleaned from that is that it's a manifold and it's the invention of some mathematicians (or maybe one mathematician with a hyphenated surname).

> If "contractualism" were just known as "Scanlon's theory" it would be a lot easier.

My disagreement would make diamonds look soft in comparison.

"Contractualism" at least conveys it might have something to do with contracts. "Scanlon's theory" tells me absolutely nothing about what it might be. That is worse by every objective measure.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#337

Post by jimmaswell »

jkaptur wrote: post #334
jimmaswell wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The absolute worst is some thing I can't remember the real name of right now - I thought it was generic programming but it doesn't seem to be it. It doesn't connotate the meaning in the slightest, and even connotated something other than what it was. It was just storing a matrix or array of past return values of a function to reuse. It feels like I'm having a Mandella moment.

Memoization? Or dynamic programming? The latter is a funny story: > ... Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities. http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/~ami/cd/or50/1526-5463-2002-50-01-0...

Dynamic programming is it. Thought I'd gone crazy for a minute.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#338

Post by null0pointer »

jimmaswell wrote: post #331
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…

The absolute worst is some thing I can't remember the real name of right now - I thought it was generic programming but it doesn't seem to be it. It doesn't connotate the meaning in the slightest, and even connotated something other than what it was. It was just storing a matrix or array of past return values of a function to reuse. It feels like I'm having a Mandella moment.

Are you thinking of dynamic programming? It's the most poorly named thing in CS, in my opinion. The name tells you absolutely nothing about what it is, and IIRC the name "dynamic" was chosen because it's difficult to use as a pejorative.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#339

Post by lambdatronics »

firebaze wrote: post #159

Complex things cannot be explained easily. As such, from this perspective, it doesn't matter if a complex topic is named by a person or by some abstract, ridiculously compressed word describing an aspect of it. But on the other hand, names are simply irrelevant. Anything is better than a name of a person, even if that person was brilliant. The person may be remembered as an aspect of some discovery (say, Einstein), b…

We've got at least one physicist in our corner:

"Hestenes is adamant about calling this mathematical approach “geometric algebra” and its extension “geometric calculus,” rather than referring to it as “Clifford algebra”."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hestenes#Geometric_algeb...

Unfortunately, this should really be called algebraic geometry, but that name is already taken by another field...

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#340

Post by afiori »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #265
ben_w wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s because when science started to get serious, Latin happened to be the lingua-Franca of those in Europe who could afford to be part of it. Equivalent deal for why we use Arabic numbers.

But Latin was used specifically because is was NOT a common tongue.

latin was used because it was the language you used to write important stuff, it was with the creation of france and Germany that other language were upgraded in social status
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