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Mathematical Jargon Failures

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Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#41

Post by JdeBP »

roelschroeven wrote: post #15
majewsky wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IT is full of jargon as well. Where else would it make sense to cherry-pick commits into a branch and then ask others to pull that branch into their repository? :) My German team has a running gag where, when a sentence turns out especially jargon-riddled, we translate all the jargon words into German, as literally as possible. The result is always hilarious.

Sometimes IT and biology share some jargon, or at least they share the words but not exactly the meaning. Both in IT and biology a collection of trees is called a forest. In IT, if you take a tree and remove the root, the result is a forest. Biologists don't agree.

Don't forget the nut metaphor.

* https://superuser.com/a/329479/38062

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#42

Post by jpfed »

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.

I think programmers care about names more than mathematicians.

Part of that might be the ages of their respective fields (if I wanted to rename "bubble sort" to "triangle sort", I would only be influencing something like 50 years of established work, whereas if you wanted to change the notation we use for derivatives, that's 400ish years).

Part of it might be the relative proportion of time we spend grappling with syntax versus the conceptual domain. While programming languages themselves don't require that much learning, we still need to learn others' APIs etc. Especially in the absence of documentation, good names are extremely valuable. But math is super documented, and most of the thinking can be done in relation to domain concepts without too much regard to syntax. I am guessing that makes good names comparatively unimportant to them.

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#43

Post by ktpsns »

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".

Just in case somebody else wonders about a reference, its here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_integral -- as the WP page on elliptic curve says: "An elliptic curve is not an ellipse: see elliptic integral for the origin of the term."

The confusing fact which Mark Dominus means is however, probably the fact that the term "Elliptic curve" seems to be a merger of the name "algebraic curve" and the defining equation

     y^2 = x^3 + ax + b
which is however not the defining equation of an ellipse. That would be instead, in its simplest form

     1 = (x/a)^2 + (y/b)^2
That's in fact confusing.

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#44

Post by abecedarius »

hannasanarion wrote: post #27
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.

I have trouble with those too: they're a composition of false/true with positive/negative to denote whether a finding of yes/no is right/wrong, but I can never remember whether false/true corresponds to yes/no or to right/wrong.

Just say things like "right yes" or "wrong no" and I'll understand. The only problem with that way of speaking is that it doesn't sound fancy.

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#46

Post by jolmg »

abecedarius wrote: post #44
hannasanarion wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have trouble with those too: they're a composition of false/true with positive/negative to denote whether a finding of yes/no is right/wrong, but I can never remember whether false/true corresponds to yes/no or to right/wrong. Just say things like "right yes" or "wrong no" and I'll understand. The only problem with that way of speaking is that it doesn't sound fancy.

> Just say things like "right yes" or "wrong no" and I'll understand.

Those have the same problem, don't they? I think you think you're replacing the positive/negative with right/wrong, but you're actually replacing the true/false. So, if you get a "wrong yes" result, is that "yes" supposed to be a good or bad thing? It's still ambiguous.

Maybe "true good" or "false bad" are better...

Then again, if both results are neither good or bad, then which is which? Maybe true/false positive/negative is indeed the less ambiguous. You just need to be clear on the question that's being answered. "Is there cancer?" "positive" means yes, "negative" means no.

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#47

Post by vharuck »

jerf wrote: post #25
whooshee wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How about including given names with everything named after one of the many Bernoullis?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_family

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#48

Post by abecedarius »

jolmg wrote: post #46
abecedarius wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have trouble with those too: they're a composition of false/true with positive/negative to denote whether a finding of yes/no is right/wrong, but I can never remember whether false/true corresponds to yes/no or to right/wrong. Just say things like "right yes" or "wrong no" and I'll understand. The only problem with that way of speaking is that it doesn't sound fancy.

> Just say things like "right yes" or "wrong no" and I'll understand. Those have the same problem, don't they? I think you think you're replacing the positive/negative with right/wrong, but you're actually replacing the true/false. So, if you get a "wrong yes" result, is that "yes" supposed to be a good or bad thing? It's still ambiguous. Maybe "true good" or "false bad" are better... Then again, if both results are…

We'd have to poll people to really know which terms are more easily remembered.

But here's how I'm thinking of it: a test says yes or no: is the thing present or not? And right/wrong is the correctness of the test. I can't see people easily getting confused and thinking "wrong yes" means that a test correctly said that the thing is not there. Anyone would think it means that the test incorrectly said the thing is there (among all the four possible meanings we're concerned about). OTOH false and negative could each more easily mean either wrong or absent.

But I may be wrong! This is only my best proposal.

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#49

Post by F-0X »

billfruit wrote: post #38

I find the terms eigenvector and eigenvalue to be especially opaque, it does not give any hint as to what it means at all to me.

The general case of eigen-things has no other term to describe it. One might want something that hints at the geometrical meaning of eigen{values,vectors} when they learn about them in the context of multiplying vectors by matrices, but ultimately the concept is a mainly algebraic one. Accepting this it becomes easy to deduce what should be meant by "eigenfunction of the differential operator". So I think, somewhat retroactively, "eigen" is the best word to use there.

Re: Mathematical Jargon Failures

#50

Post by Kalium »

abecedarius wrote: post #44
hannasanarion wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have trouble with those too: they're a composition of false/true with positive/negative to denote whether a finding of yes/no is right/wrong, but I can never remember whether false/true corresponds to yes/no or to right/wrong. Just say things like "right yes" or "wrong no" and I'll understand. The only problem with that way of speaking is that it doesn't sound fancy.

> Just say things like "right yes" or "wrong no" and I'll understand.

OK. So s/false/right/ and s/right/true/ and s/negative/no/ and s/positive/yes/.

Does that work for you? Positive and negative are about the outcome of the test - did it report whatever or not? True and false are about if this result corresponds to reality or not.

It might just be me, but "wrong yes" sounds like it's claiming something very specific about the test. It's claiming that test said something was present and it wasn't. It's possible that this might not align with how the test works. Calling it a false positive would seem to make it clear that it's positive from the test's perspective.

But I may be wrong! This is clearly just opinion.

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