Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other • Hacker News Board

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#81

Post by dragonwriter » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

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…

> For example, Hermitian and Brownian are adjectives, much like Ethiopian or Libertarian or anything else ending in -ian

As noted in a sibling comment, Ethiopian and Libertarian are both also nouns. As are lots of things ending in -ian, some also adjectives, some not (mathematician, statistician, magician, parliamentarian, crossopterygian, historian, librarian, fruitarian,...)

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#82

Post by yongjik » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

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.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#83

Post by abnry » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

woopwoop wrote: post #28

I don't think descriptive names per se would be especially helpful. The challenge of understanding a concept typically dwarfs the challenge of remembering a name. Some people, though, have so many things named after them that Googling for concepts can become challenging. In my thesis, I needed to use something called the Steiner point, which is sometimes also called the Steiner curvature centroid, although I didn't k…

I don't see how your example proves your point. It is not plausible to think about curvature when discussing triangles (you may discuss curvature of constructed circles, but that's tautological to the size of the circles...) so searching for "Steiner Curvature Point" should help find what you need faster.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#84

Post by nabla9 » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

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…

Yet another example: International relations theory overloads "Liberalism", "Realism" and "Idealism". It's too easy to project meaning for already overloaded words like these.

Long articles and opinion pieces are written by people who saw something with these words and it never occurred for them that they should check out what these words mean in the context.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#85

Post by abnry » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

parsimo2010 wrote: post #48

This falls a little flat with me. Let's consider an example from the article- a Kähler manifold. I'm not a geometer, so I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it says that a "Kähler manifold is a manifold with three mutually compatible structures: a complex structure, a Riemannian structure, and a symplectic structure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4hler_manifold Two of those things are not named after a person, and…

> Let's not get rid of our ability to honor people in a failed attempt to make the communication more effective.

I think we should honor mathematicians less with eponymous theorems (prestige culture is toxic), but I agree it shouldn't be done at the expense of worse communication.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#86

Post by dvt » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

didibus wrote: post #65

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…

Completely agree. And when using common terms, people also make all kind of assumptions from it, and that comes with a bias, before even getting a grasp of the concept it describes in a given field.

Going to pile on to the agreement here -- for example, much confusion can be had when discussing things like "intentionality" with laypeople. Philosophy is riddled with regular words that take non-regular meanings. It might make philosophers feel smart, but it's a detriment to the field imo.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#87

Post by jmeister » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

petermcneeley wrote: post #31

We all know what this article is really about. It is disappointing to see these kinds of articles on hn. (posted multiple times as well) ref: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

I came here to make the same comment so I’ll be the explainer:

It’s about erasing white male names/dominance/influence/privilege/?? from math history.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#88

Post by abnry » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

superhuzza wrote: post #21

I actually agree with the author's premise, I think she makes a good case that some of these concepts would be both more approachable, and more memorable, with simpler names. However, coming up with simple names is incredibly difficult. It's easy to write a 10,000 word on a complicated topic, but incredibly difficult to squish it into a few letters.

This is exactly how I feel. What I do think you can criticize, however, is the lack of imagination mathematicians have in naming theorems. If only there were more Ham Sandwich Theorems [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#89

Post by kxyvr » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

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 have an argument about whether we should call the triangle inequality the Cauchy-Schwarz or the Kantorovich inequality? How many years did it take to recognize Karush for providing algebraic optimality conditions long before Kuhn and Tucker?

Anyway, outside of general griping about names, very specifically, I have to regularly interact with technical people in other fields and memorizing names is one additional, often superfluous, barrier to their understanding. Even if it's important for someone credit the (supposed) originator outside of a citation, giving an intuitive name for the context would go a long way in improving understanding. For example, the triangle inequality from Cauchy and Schwarz or the algebraic optimality conditions from Karush, Kuhn, and Tucker.

By the way, I'll also mention that the majority of other mathematicians that I know don't feel this way and prefer using names after people. I understand; I just disagree.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#90

Post by abnry » Sat, Sep 05, 2020, 7:06 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #24

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #10

Sounds reasonable. Let's call this new policy "Ball's Law".

Mathematicians like it when _others_ attach their names to their seminal works; such pride must be stopped argues author who (I am assuming) attaches their own name to their work. #ironic It must be called the "mathematicians should stop naming things after each other" law!

This is not a fair criticism. The author attributes herself as the author to her piece because that is relevant information. But nowhere does she try to name the idea she raises after herself.