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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

#271

Post by walrus01 »

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…

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.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#272

Post by srtjstjsj »

yongjik wrote: post #192
ehmmmmmmmm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

In the same vein, Seoul = "capital". It used to be a correct expression to say "the Seoul of North Korea is Pyongyang," in Korean. These days I guess it will draw weird looks.

Word2Vec sees no problem with this.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#273

Post by jerbs »

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…

Yeah, I laughed when I read that sentence. Although some rules in law have naming conventions that tell you something about the underlying rule (for example, the merger doctrine, or assault with a deadly weapon), a huge number of rules are named after the case that created the rule--or, in other words, just a person or company's name. So in administrative law, you might apply Chevron deference, or say that a post-hoc rationalization poses a Chenery problem. And, of course, sometimes lawyers disagree about what case created or recognized a rule, so you'll have some people calling something Auer deference, with others calling it Seminole Rock deference.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#275

Post by srtjstjsj »

kxyvr wrote: post #89
saithound wrote: post #50

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…

As a counterpoint, I've a Ph.D in math and I largely agree with the article. Frankly, it's difficult enough to keep track of the names in my own field much less interact with people in other fields who would greatly benefit from these results if they were comprehensible. While I agree that precision is necessary, is it really that hard to say something like a complete inner product space vs a Hilbert space? Should we…

If only math used completely intuitive names for concepts everywhere, like class, set, group, ring, field, ideal, domain (not the same as "domain"!), fiber, sheaf, manifold, oh wait.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#276

Post by Thorrez »

yissp wrote: post #262
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 a funny one, it's named after one of its creators, but also describes what the algorithm does. Kinda like Baker's chocolate (named after Walter Baker, but is popular for baking). I wonder if there are other examples.

Here's a list of them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23888725

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#277

Post by repsilat »

29athrowaway wrote: post #231
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…

A few other favorites: Knuth shuffle, Levinshtein distance, Dijkstra's algorithm, Kruskal's algorithm, Kosajaru-Sharir algorithm, Bellman-Ford algorithm, Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm, Boyer-Moore algorithm, Rabin-Karp algorithm, Turing machines...

> Levinshtein distance

Common enough (though there's a diversity of pronunciation and spelling of the name), though for any practical purpose probably "edit distance" works better. (And Hamming distance would probably be better called XOR distance or something.)

Funny coincidence, there was a comment on HN the other day when someone called Euclidean distance "bird distance", and everyone agreed it was a great coinage. I think "Manhattan distance" is similarly evocative, and no less precise than any alternative.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#278

Post by Thorrez »

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'…

You just have to get high enough in Mountain View to see the mountains. I was walking along Steven's Creek Trail, and there was a certain point where I could see mountains in all 4 directions (north, south, east, west).

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#279

Post by srtjstjsj »

WoahNoun wrote: post #176
saithound wrote: post #50

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…

We should strive to remove all references to Teichmüller. It is abhorrent that the name of a prominent Nazi is so deeply embedded in modern mathematics.

You can start calling them Alfhors spaces instead.

But I think it's important to keep Teichmuller around as a reminder of the important lesson (especially around here) that mathematical genius does mean that everything one says on all topics is logically or morally correct.

As Teichmuller wrote: > I am not concerned with making difficulties for you as a Jew, but only with protecting – above all – German students of the second semester from being taught differential and integral calculus by a teacher of a race quite foreign to them. I, like everyone else, do not doubt your ability to instruct suitable students of whatever origin in the purely abstract aspects of mathematics. But I know that many academic courses, especially the differential and integral calculus, have at the same time educative value, inducting the pupil not only to a conceptual world but also to a different frame of mind. But since the latter depends very substantially on the racial composition of the individual, it follows that a German student should not be allowed to be trained by a Jewish teacher.[8]

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#280

Post by roenxi »

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…

> terminology being "accessible" doesn't really matter, but being precise does.

There is also an argument that for experts names are even more accessible than the alternative - if a descriptive name is used but is wrong, then it becomes more confusing. Math already has a problem with overloading common words with special meanings.

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