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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

#71

Post by mehrdadn »

tomcam wrote: post #32
mehrdadn wrote: post #11

Not sure how feasible or necessary this is in general, but there are certainly some places for improvement. Some more modern examples than "isosceles": - Heaviside function → step function (edit: though maybe this one is, amusingly, already descriptive by accident?) - Fourier domain → frequency domain While I'm here, just a couple suggestions from me: - Markov chain → memoryless chain - Lebesgue integral → horizontal…

Was prepared to dislike these suggestions but I think they're all solid. Good thinking.

Thank you! :) Though I'd assume I'm not the first to think of them haha.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#73

Post by hcs »

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…

A lot of medical and legal terms are literal in some way, but Greek or Latin, so I don't know how much that helps.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#74

Post by Someone »

elondaits wrote: post #42
neutronicus wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because "easy to google" is much more important in the short, medium, and long runs than "easy to guess what it does"

Not everything is easy to Google: C, D, F, R, COM, .NET, node ...

Python (the snake; doesn’t show up at all for me in Google’s “All” results).

Swift (the bird; Google eventually gives me https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/swift, but that page thinks it’s more common as a name of a lizard than as the name of a bird, so Google’s small preview says “Definition of swift · 1 : any of several lizards (especially of the genus Sceloporus) that run swiftly · 2 : a reel for winding yarn…”)

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#75

Post by 2038AD »

dheera wrote: post #33

My biggest gripe with mathematical naming isn't what the author wrote, but by the inconsistency of noun/adjective endings. For example, Hermitian and Brownian are adjectives, much like Ethiopian or Libertarian or anything else ending in -ian. But Hamiltonian, Jacobian, and Lagrangian are nouns. I'd much prefer they be called the Hamilton, the Jacob, and the Lagrange, for consistency in syntax in parsing. It always tr…

'Ethiopian' and 'Libertarian' are both also nouns

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#76

Post by disown »

saagarjha wrote: post #18
archgoon wrote: post #13

Yep; check out how the programming community does it! We have descriptive names for things like "Apache", "React", "nginx", "Rust", and "Java"!

Also check out "Duff's device" or "Dijkstra's algorithm" ;)

Huffman coding, Turing Machine, Amdahl's law, Boolean algebra, Currying, Ada, etc

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#77

Post by Waterluvian »

I have no opinion on naming stuff at advanced levels. But in high school and university I felt a palpable frustration on a very regular basis for randomly named stuff. I couldn’t and still can’t get my brain to remember things with unrelated names.

So when I learn about and need to recall “isostatic rebound” and not “the Chip Dipson Effect” it just eliminates an entire layer of key lookup and parsing I have to do.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#79

Post by i_cannot_hack »

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…

At first I agreed with you, but I think your analogy to algorithms actually somewhat counters your point.

The Wikipedia article for Dijkstra's algorithm gives an alternative name of "Shortest Path First", or "SPF algorithm", which I do think is a much better and more descriptive name.

It also made me think of sorting algorithms, which all have wonderfully snappy and descriptive names. I think the world would be a sadder place if – instead of quicksort, mergesort, and heapsort – we had to struggle with opaque names like Hoare sort, Neumann sort, and Williams sort.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#80

Post by glennon »

Tangential--I used to work with a lot of caves as a hydrogeologist:

Seven favorite cave names: Abisso "Queen Mama", Big Cave with Bats, Cave of the Swords, Eisriesenwelt (world of the ice giants), Hell Below, Lemon Drop, Mad As A Wet Hen Pit

Nice caves, but seven names that could use some help: Carroll Cave, Ellison's Cave, Fitton Cave, Kartchner Caverns, Lehman Cave, Lilburn Cave, Russell Cave

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