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Mathematical Jargon Failures

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Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#21

Post by IshKebab »

MzxgckZtNqX5i wrote: post #6

I can see the point, but I don't think it's a problem as long as the concept is well-defined. It's only a matter of getting used to don't assume, for example, "open" and "closed" to be mutually exclusive. There are other fields that don't have the privilege of this formal setting: I expect the concept of "species" to be very important in biology, but there isn't a clear definition of that (yet) [0]. [0] https://en.wi…

The problem is that it requires extra mental effort for zero benefit. For example if I tell you that cos(x) is a symmetric function and sin(x) is antisymmetric, the meaning is far more obvious than if I tell you one is odd and the other is even. It costs you time looking the words up and energy remembering them.

Species doesn't have an exactly bounded definition because it is not an exactly bounded thing. It's like trying to define "life". This doesn't really have anything to do with bad jargon though so I'm not sure why you brought it up.

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#22

Post by tempodox »

I'm glad to see I'm not alone in my desperation over the fact that names in math don't always mean what they seem to mean. Intelligent programmers have noted more than once that naming things is one of the greatest challenges. In hindsight, it shouldn't be too surprising that math suffers from the same difficulty.

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#23

Post by tempodox »

mjd wrote: post #10
eapriv wrote: post #9

> That's right, ellipses are not elliptic curves, and elliptic curves are not elliptical. I don't know who was responsible for this idiocy, but if I ever meet them I'm going to kick them in the ass. The referenced Wikipedia page contains a perfectly valid explanation for the term "elliptic curves", and a little googling reveals that it was Legendre who's responsible for "this idiocy".

Well, if I ever meet this Legender guy, I'm gonna kick his ass. You can tell him I said that.

Legendre

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#24

Post by tzs »

> Often brought up as an example are the topological notions of “open” and “closed” sets. It sounds as if they should be exclusive and exhaustive — surely a set that is open is not closed, and vice versa? — but no, there are sets that are neither open nor closed and other sets that are both

For a rant on this see "Hitler Learns Topology" [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyD4p8_y8Kw

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#25

Post by jerf »

whooshee wrote: post #7
pfortuny wrote: post #4

The Type I and Type II errors is especially hurtful to me: I am totally unable to remember which is which and each time I read an article containing them I think: well, I am probably going to get it wrong again but I cannot bother to check the definition one more time... who cares?

Same here, and some definitions named by people's names. I totally understand the need to attribute and respect people's work, but a more descriptive name is almost always easier to remember and talk about.

This one at least has the justification that there often aren't any words. When you're hip-deep in topology, grabbing graph theory with your right hand and algebra with your left, you've left English way behind anyhow.

Now we just need to go back in time and convince Euler and Grothendieck to pretty-please either discover fewer things, or change their names every couple of years or something.

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#27

Post by hannasanarion »

pfortuny wrote: post #4

The Type I and Type II errors is especially hurtful to me: I am totally unable to remember which is which and each time I read an article containing them I think: well, I am probably going to get it wrong again but I cannot bother to check the definition one more time... who cares?

I don't understand why they need to be numbered at all. What's wrong with "False Positive" and "False Negative"? They even take less time to say.

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#28

Post by tempguy9999 »

tempodox wrote: post #22

I'm glad to see I'm not alone in my desperation over the fact that names in math don't always mean what they seem to mean. Intelligent programmers have noted more than once that naming things is one of the greatest challenges. In hindsight, it shouldn't be too surprising that math suffers from the same difficulty.

Oh yes. I've a book on dynamic programming (Applied Dynamic Programming, Bellman + Dreyfus, seriously over my head unfortunately) which uses missionaries, cannibals and a boat to cross a river (page 97). The authors talk about M cannibals and N missionaries. Note again: he used the letter M for cannibals, not the missionaries, which I note start with that letter. And he could have called the cannibals C but, no.

I literally can't understand what mental process led them to do this, or not realise.

Another thing I detest is mathematician's fear of brackets. They'd rather use a tower of unstated precedences than just bracketing the fuckers. Fine, I suppose, if you know the subject but I was trying to learn something recently, something with quantifiers and implications nested densely, and was left mentally bracketing the various subexpressions to (try to!) work out what was meant. If I have to fight the syntax I'm already being blocked from understanding the semantics.

Mathematicians really do make things hard sometimes.

Thankfully us programmers are so much better (sarc)

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#29

Post by jerf »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #28
tempodox wrote: post #22

I'm glad to see I'm not alone in my desperation over the fact that names in math don't always mean what they seem to mean. Intelligent programmers have noted more than once that naming things is one of the greatest challenges. In hindsight, it shouldn't be too surprising that math suffers from the same difficulty.

Oh yes. I've a book on dynamic programming (Applied Dynamic Programming, Bellman + Dreyfus, seriously over my head unfortunately) which uses missionaries, cannibals and a boat to cross a river (page 97). The authors talk about M cannibals and N missionaries. Note again: he used the letter M for cannibals, not the missionaries, which I note start with that letter. And he could have called the cannibals C but, no. I li…

Ah yes, you reminded me. There was another piece of jargon I was trying to come up with that really stinks earlier, but I couldn't remember it. And that's what it was: dynamic programming. Terrible name:

"Where did the name, dynamic programming, come from? The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word research. I’m not using the term lightly; I’m using it precisely. His face would suffuse, he would turn red, and he would get violent if people used the term research in his presence. You can imagine how he felt, then, about the term mathematical. The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force, and the Air Force had Wilson as its boss, essentially. Hence, I felt I had to do something to shield Wilson and the Air Force from the fact that I was really doing mathematics inside the RAND Corporation. What title, what name, could I choose? In the first place I was interested in planning, in decision making, in thinking. But planning, is not a good word for various reasons. I decided therefore to use the word “programming”. I wanted to get across the idea that this was dynamic, this was multistage, this was time-varying. I thought, let's kill two birds with one stone. Let's take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense. It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that is it's impossible to use the word dynamic in a pejorative sense. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It's impossible. Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History

A Congressman may not be able to object, but I do! It's a particular flavor of recursion, and perhaps a flavor of the term "recursion" would be called for, but "dynamic programming" is essentially meaningless. Any addition meaning that phrase may have in your head is almost certainly unrelated to what the term refers to, since we've used "static" and "dynamic" in all sorts of ways since the 1950s.

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