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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

#391

Post by didibus »

aeternum wrote: post #352
didibus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? It's not the same concept, just vaguely similar to some other thing. But all of the interesting aspects are in the difference, otherwise we wouldn't bother mathematically with the concept in the first place.

Similar != Same

And treating similar things as same is the source of a lot of error and confusion and misinterpretation.

If its just to help a beginner at first with a little bit of understanding, you can just say X is a bit like Y, but also very different in really important ways so forget most of what you assume about X, because Y does not work like X, even though it has relations to it.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#392

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

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 your hard disagree.

Because I don't give a shit about who discovered something allegedly first. I do care about what it means/does. Maybe it's a language problem, because some languages make it more easy to add words into a new word describing that new thing.

edit: Otherwise it's just protocol overhead, line noise, gibberish to me.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#393

Post by kergonath »

mehrdadn wrote: post #388
kergonath wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes, it’s bad, I am not defending it (and I have never seen it in the wild, even in class when I was taught Riemann integration). I am not sure how the supposed popularity of ‘right Riemann sum’ means that ‘horizontal integral’ would be any good.

I guess I'm saying it's not bad; you're just declaring it as such. People find them quite intuitive. I don't know about you but I've literally never seen someone get confused over silly things like "why is it called a left sum if I can plot the function in the other direction".

OTOH I’ve literally never seen someone using that phrase but obviously YMMV. It’s useful as a teaching aid and that’s about it. It’s easy to come up with examples of bad nomenclature used in the wild so I’m not sure what your point is. If you think it’s fine, then, more power to you. It wasn’t about that.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#394

Post by DonHopkins »

Phrenzy wrote: post #385
DonHopkins wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd call my sorting technique "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Sort" so it gets listed first in the algorithm directory.

!my sort is better.... sort.

!AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARMS RACE SORT

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#395

Post by DonHopkins »

muzani wrote: post #294
ben_w wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Page rank is probably one of the more clever names out there. I didn't realize at first it was named after the founder, as it's a good description to how it works.

    rank (adj):
      1. (of vegetation) growing too thickly and coarsely.
      2. having a foul or offensive smell. very unpleasant.
      3. (especially of something bad or deficient) complete 
         and utter (used for emphasis).

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#396

Post by DonHopkins »

a1369209993 wrote: post #314
elgenie wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I thought orthogonal surface vectors were named after Abby Normal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9Pw0xX4DXI

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#397

Post by kazinator »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #375
kazinator wrote: post #41

> Imagine how much steeper the learning curve would be in medicine or law if they used the same naming conventions, with the same number of layers to peel back: I she kidding? Off the top of my head: diseases named after people. Parkinson's disease. McArdle's disease. Bell's Palsy, Hodgkin's Lymphoma, ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_anatomical_parts... In Law, precedents are referred to by plaintiff a…

The whole argument seems to be a plea for better mnemonics, but "clearer" meanings aren't often that much clearer because of the ambiguity introduced (and often hidden). When law does use descriptive terms it's actively damaging to lay people. Too many laws are written where common words mean something similar to but importantly different from what they mean in the field. So then as a layperson you think you know wha…

Using names which mean something is impractical. The whole point of a name is to have a symbol so that we don't have to mention the meaning. The meaning is what the symbol invokes by association, not what it contains literally. The meaning is verbose, far more so than the symbol, and trying to capture meaning in names creates unwieldy, verbose names that far far short of capturing all the meaning.

We include meaning-words in names. That's why it's "Bell's palsy" and "Feigenbaum constant", and not just "Bell's" or "Feigenbaum".

Such shortenings are possible in a narrowly established context surrounding an informal conversations.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#398

Post by thaumasiotes »

a1369209993 wrote: post #318
thaumasiotes wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Shanghai 伤害 is a Chinese verb meaning "hurt". Would that mean that "shanghaiing" someone is "actually" a euphemistic reference to the injury suffered by enslaved sailors?

It's an English word; it's got nothing to do with Chinese.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#399

Post by boyobo »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #392
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 your hard disagree. Because I don't give a shit about who discovered something allegedly first. I do care about what it means/does. Maybe it's a language problem, because some languages make it more easy to add words into a new word describing that new thing. edit: Otherwise it's just protocol overhead, line noise, gibberish to me.

Any name given to object is necessarily going to be an incomplete description of said object. It's a tradeoff between the length of the description and the precision of the description. If you want to know what the object does you can look up its definition.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#400

Post by a1369209993 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #398
a1369209993 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Shanghai 伤害 is a Chinese verb meaning "hurt". Would that mean that "shanghaiing" someone is "actually" a euphemistic reference to the injury suffered by enslaved sailors? It's an English word; it's got nothing to do with Chinese.

I was asking after the etymology, actually; were whoever coined the term aware of the meaning in Chinese? (Compare eg pagerank or bakers' chocolate elsewhere in thread - named after a proper noun, but the term as used is a description - but in this case it would be the reverse - named after a description, but the term as used references a proper noun.) Rereading I agree that wasn't obvious, though.
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