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Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

nautil.us

351–360 of 406 posts

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#351
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…

I like the idea that git is named after the guy who discovered it.

Git wasn’t invented, it was discovered.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#352
post #70

I think the reason is that the concepts are so abstract, no concrete word makes sense. So in the face of an arbitrary choice people use names. The situation isn't much better in computer science, where now when you look up half the simple nouns in the dictionary, you get some language, tool, or javascript library claiming it.

Exactly, if you pick a name that kinda sorta describes the concept, but not really because it's a very precise abstract technical concept and actually has no real parallel with day to day mondaine life, it doesn't actually help people understand the concept. Often time it actually gives them the wrong impression. I think beginners are looking for shortcuts, can I reduce this complicated thing into something I already…

It seems like very few concepts are truly unique. At the very least, they have some relation to other concepts so it would be advantageous to make up a name/word that is similar to an existing concept.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#354
post #211

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.

I was telling a friend about Bloom filters and he'd never looked into them, because he'd assumed from the name that they were some kind of screen space shader.

He wasn't assuming - there are Bloom shaders[1] are an item in Computer Graphics, but at least the name has intrinsic logic ("light bloom")

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_(shader_effect)

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#355
post #313

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…

But could you propose a better name for the math terms you mentioned? Fermat last theorem for example is famous because of its history and not significance and I don't think any other name would be better. Pythagorus theorem - how to call it with a short and significant name? The only option I can think of is "a squared plus b squared equals c squared" which is hardly a good name :)

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#356

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…

> Chu constructions Star-autonomous category constructions? > Girard's paradox Provability paradox? > Calabi-Yau manifold Smooth n-dimensional complex manifold? > Dijkstra's algorithm Shortest-path-first algorithm? (I'm cheating here because this is literally an already-common alternative name for it) > Haber–Bosch process Ammonia synthesis loop? (Also cheating here, since the "Ammonia production" Wikipedia article u…

The names you suggest are generic terms that already exist in the respective jargons with different, more generic (and in fact more intuitive) meanings. It's like noticing that the name "Jonathan" has no mnemonic function in the term "Jonathan apple", then suggesting the term "fruit" as a better replacement. This would not solve, but exacerbate the issues raised in article, in that this would make all of learning, teaching and expert communication harder (compare your suggestions with the ham sandwich theorem, a snappy name which serves as an exceptionally good mnemonic device for both the theorem and its usual proof, despite not mentioning Lebesgue measure, Euclidean space, exact division, or really any specific objects involved in the statement of the theorem).

Non-Otto four-stroke cycles abound (cf. Diesel cycle); new industrial methods for ammonia synthesis come into existence every few years and there's not much point in singling one out and calling it _the_ ammonia synthesis loop. The case of shortest-path algorithms has been thoroughly discussed upthread. Your suggestion for Calabi-Yau and Girard's paradox are not coherent with the meanings of these terms.

No big deal: giving a purer meaning to the words of the tribe is not easy, and requires deep domain expertise. And those with deep domain expertise do think about this task, have some strong incentives to think about it (teaching evaluations factor into promotion and tenure) and generally do fairly well at it.

(Startup idea: your-jargon-reform-is-bad as a service, backed by GPT-3?)

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#357
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.

>Bloom filters prove OP’s point though.

That depends on your native language, though. For Non-English speakers sounds no different than 'Shell sort'.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#358
post #353
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a brand name.

Sure. So is Ford. But back in 1909, it was also the name of the guy who signed the patent. Whose company name was his surname.

>"where naming is more like branding"

I meant it followed the branding pattern, so it happened the brand was derived from the name.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chu constructions Star-autonomous category constructions? > Girard's paradox Provability paradox? > Calabi-Yau manifold Smooth n-dimensional complex manifold? > Dijkstra's algorithm Shortest-path-first algorithm? (I'm cheating here because this is literally an already-common alternative name for it) > Haber–Bosch process Ammonia synthesis loop? (Also cheating here, since the "Ammonia production" Wikipedia article u…

The names you suggest are generic terms that already exist in the respective jargons with different, more generic (and in fact more intuitive) meanings. It's like noticing that the name "Jonathan" has no mnemonic function in the term "Jonathan apple", then suggesting the term "fruit" as a better replacement. This would not solve, but exacerbate the issues raised in article, in that this would make all of learning, te…

> The names you suggest are generic terms that already exist in the respective jargons with different, more generic (and in fact more intuitive) meanings.

The last three, like I mentioned, were pretty much direct from Wikipedia.

But yeah, I'm under no pretense that these are necessarily correct. My only point is that we can surely do better than "$person $thing" for nomenclature. The Otto cycle is a perfect example; sure, "four stroke cycle" might be too broad, but "spark-ignited four stroke cycle" (maybe abbreviated to SI4C) doesn't seem to be (there are technically other such cycles, but the vast majority of the time people talk about a spark -ignited four-stroke cycle they're talking about an Otto cycle or some evolution thereof).

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Append programming language to the query for searching. Imagine C++ would be named as "Object oriented, generic, general purpose programming language with C compatibility"(of course C won't be named C then).

It could be called Stroustrupilian ... or "The one with Turing complete templates".

> "The one with Turing complete templates"

Java has Turing complete generics as well

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