
Mathematicians Should Stop Naming Things After Each Other - steventhedev
http://nautil.us/issue/89/the-dark-side/why-mathematicians-should-stop-naming-things-after-each-other
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heinrichhartman
Having worked in mathematics for 10+ years, I can tell for sure, that the
least problem you will face when trying to understand Calabi-Yau manifolds are
the naming conventions.

Unwrapping the last term alone is a multi-year endevour if you start from
scratch:

> [A] manifold is a locally ringed space, whose structure sheaf is locally
> isomorphic to the sheaf of continuous (or differentiable, or complex-
> analytic, etc.) functions on Euclidean space [IR^n]. --
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold#Mathematical_definiti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold#Mathematical_definition)

Note that definition, does barely use inventor's names and is still very dense
and hard to unwrap.

I never found naming conventions to be a notable problem.

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FabHK
Agreed. Even if a relatively short description is possible ("complete normed
vector space"), if a concept is used often enough, it might be named (in the
case of the example, "Banach space") - what's the problem with that?

In daily life, we don't say "Pull the horizontal surface suitable to sit on
closer to the somewhat higher horizontal surface suitable to perform office
tasks on", we say "Pull the chair closer to the desk", because we have given
these concepts names.

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proto-n
"This nesting of proper nouns helps to make higher math impenetrable not just
to outsiders, but also to working mathematicians trying to read their way from
one subfield into another."

As if the biggest and only hurdle to understanding and working with advanced
math was learning names... by the time you understand the concept and it's
importance to a degree that you can work with it, the name becomes second
nature.

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dia80
In my limited experience these objects are complicated and unintuitive enough
that it would be hard to come up with a short simple descriptive name for
them. So then you are back to applying an arbitrary label, like a name!

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el_oni
But then, who better to name them than the individuals who made the
breakthrough? As the article mentions, the pair of pants, hairy ball theorem,
no free lunch, and refers to conway, presumably the game of life.

The creators/inventors/discoverers are in the best position to come up with a
name, because they presumably understand the concept enough. Though it does
require a degree of creativity.

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mr_mitm
The author certainly has a point. However, when he mentioned rote memorization
I was reminded how easy it came to me to remember all these names. I majored
in physics and minored in math, and at some point I realized how many theorems
and mathematical objects I knew that were named after a person without sitting
down and trying to memorize them. As soon as the concept of, say, a Taylor
series, Hilbert space, Schrödinger equation, the Schwarzschild radius or the
Tesla unit was introduced, the name stuck immediately.

Then again, I could add another argument as to why naming things after persons
is bad: it's ridiculous how many things have been named after Euler [1] or
Gauß [2]. But I'm not aware that this causes widespread confusion. Maybe it's
not a problem.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leonhard_Euler)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Car...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Carl_Friedrich_Gauss)

~~~
mantap
In terms of memorisation, naming something after a person is very beneficial.

The ease of remembering something is a function of how many associations you
can make to it. For instance, for a person you can associate with their name:

1\. Where they lived.

2\. What they looked like.

3\. Interesting information about their life

For example you might remember Galois lived in France, he looked like a kid
and he died in a duel.

If someone just makes up a word it's going to be much harder to remember
because there's no attachment points for associations.

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prvc
Perhaps the opposite is true-- to wit, a concept given a special name makes it
easier to remember, marks it distinctively, and the assignment of the name
itself indicates that it is an important concept. In the case of prolific
discoverers such as Thurston, or say, Euler, the second quality breaks down,
but this can be obviated by choosing different descriptive names (which
themselves need not even exclude giving credit to their discoverers, provided
they are chosen appropriately).

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extremeMath
Meh, if naming things encourages people to come up with discoveries for
humanity, it's worth it.

These jobs pay like crap but require an intellectual.

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BerislavLopac
My favourite maths-related term:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine)

