
Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other - abnry
http://nautil.us/issue/89/the-dark-side/why-mathematicians-should-stop-naming-things-after-each-other
======
crazygringo
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 remember which is the general term and which refers to a
specific theory drives me nuts. (If "contractualism" were just known as
"Scanlon's theory" it would be a lot easier.)

Naming things after their creator is actually super-helpful because it's
really easy to disambiguate, helps situate things historically, and once
you're at that level there often isn't a single unique word or phrase that can
easily encapsulate the idea anyways and isn't easily confused with something
else.

~~~
ardit33
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
than one).

Math, and physics to some degree, have become self-referential to the point
that start becoming more esoteric magic black books to beginners...

While CS was born out of Math folks, and unfortunately has adopted some of the
same esoteric symbolics, I hope Computer Science doesn't follow that path on
the long term, otherwise it will become divorced from day to day real life
applications.

Let me give you a clear example:

Now, imagine if we called Double Linked Lists as "Darombolo lists", or whoever
invented it. (I made up that name), Double Linked List is very easy to
visualize and remember. "Giacomo Darombolo List", is not, and just adds to
'must cram/memorize' things to make things work.....

I personally don't like "cramming" useless trivia in order to work in my
field. I hope Computer Science divorces from Math, and takes its own path to
more logical naming of things and less useless symbols used in it.

It is like the whole field suffers because the authors' Narcissism, that they
must name things after them.

~~~
knome
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 contexts and beginners may get confused at our
reuse of terminology. Often the reuse gives some metaphorical understanding to
the newcomer, even if it largely leads them astray in the details.

~~~
labster
Bloom filters prove OP’s point though. The first few times I heard the term, I
wondered how a Photoshop filter to blur things could possibly apply to the
problem. Maybe if it was called an exclusion filter it would be less jargony,
I don’t know; naming things is hard.

~~~
sriku
At least having a word like "filter" in it narrows down the choices even if it
doesn't make it unique. If instead it was "Bloom's construction" or "Bloom's
algorithm", or "Tim's procedure", we'll be at a total loss to even guess what
it was about, which is what happens with a lot of math starting from
"Pythagorus theorem", anyone instantly recall "Apollonius' theorem", "Ackerman
function", "Euler's function"?. If "Fermat's last theorem" or "Goldbach
conjectures" weren't crazy famous I wouldn't have a clue.. The request to at
least give us a "Fourier transform", if not "frequency spectrum" is not
unreasonable.

I've lamented this for a long time, but on the other side, I doubt if
mathematicians would ever get sufficient recognition if their names weren't
immortalized thus, since they can't get patents on their works. They totally
deserve recognition. Would you even remember Leonard Euler if his work was
named factually? Most of us I guess have no idea who came up with
sin/cos/exp/log etc. I'm glad for the names of these functions, but lament the
loss of knowledge about the one (or many) who discovered them.

Longer names are a candidate .. along the lines of "Einstein's theory of
general relativity". "Euler's relative prime counting function" .. but they
too will likely, depending on familiarity, collapse over time.

~~~
yeellow
But could you propose a better name for the math terms you mentioned? Fermat
last theorem for example is famous because of its history and not significance
and I don't think any other name would be better. Pythagorus theorem - how to
call it with a short and significant name? The only option I can think of is
"a squared plus b squared equals c squared" which is hardly a good name :)

~~~
sriku
The alternative "Euclidean distance" is already half way there and is better
since we at least know it's about "distance". At this point, offering any
alternative will feel alien and unfamiliar, but "Linear distance" works for me
if I feel the need to push Euclid out as well.

edit: If I want to talk about distance in a curved space, we already have a
well named "Geodesic distance".

~~~
diffeomorphism
That sounds like a different theorem. While it conincides with sums of squares
of distances for the Euclidean setting, for the case of a sphere or other
manifold it is decidedly about triangles, not so much distances.

------
kazinator
> _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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_anatomical_parts_named_after_people)

In Law, precedents are referred to by plaintiff and defendant names: Smith vs.
Klein. There are laws named after people, e.g. in the US. Kirsten's Law; Mann
Act; Wetterling Act; Sonny Bono Copyright Extension; ...

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
The whole argument seems to be a plea for better mnemonics, but "clearer"
meanings aren't often that much clearer because of the ambiguity introduced
(and often hidden).

When law _does_ use descriptive terms it's actively damaging to lay people.
Too many laws are written where common words mean something similar to but
importantly different from what they mean in the field. So then as a layperson
you _think_ you know what is legally required to do, but (surprise!) you
don't.

This is why in programming, we're so often suggested to name new things non-
descriptive terms. As you replace things and split things out and combine them
together, you introduce tons of ambiguity if you name things too
descriptively.

I'd read the evolution of math to name things how they do to be a collective
choice for precision, rather than a move for people's egos.

~~~
kazinator
Using names which mean something is impractical. The whole point of a name is
to have a symbol _so that_ we don't have to mention the meaning. The meaning
is what the symbol invokes by association, not what it contains literally. The
meaning is verbose, far more so than the symbol, and trying to capture meaning
in names creates unwieldy, verbose names that far far short of capturing all
the meaning.

We include meaning-words in names. That's why it's "Bell's palsy" and
"Feigenbaum constant", and not just "Bell's" or "Feigenbaum".

Such shortenings are possible in a narrowly established context surrounding an
informal conversations.

------
yongjik
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.

~~~
ehmmmmmmmm
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'an = western peace

Tokyo = eastern capital

Taipei = north Tai

Tainan = south Tai

Taichung = middle Tai

Taitung = east Tai

Shandong = east mountains

Shanxi = west mountains etc.

~~~
ajmurmann
Many places, even in the West, were named after unique characteristics.
Language changed though. I studied in a German town called Paderborn (we
lovingly called it "Paderboring" though). A river called Pader originates
there and the word "born" is old German for source or spring. Many other
German towns have similar names that make sense in old German or are derived
from Latin names that were more descriptive but nobody understands anymore.

In the USA there are many places like that as well and it's more obvious,
since language hasn't changed since they were named. Ironically the landscape
has due to human doing in many cases. Think Thousand Oaks, Walnut Creek, Mill
Valley

A sibling post makes the argument that descriptive names would eventually lose
the descriptively as language changes. This is very much validated by the
German names. However, that took hundreds if not over a thousand years in some
cases.

~~~
GrantZvolsky
Case in point: Pontefract*

The advantage of descriptive names is that the more you know, the more you can
infer despite them being far removed from current language. On the other hand
if there isn't a good candidate for a descriptive name, a surname-shaped nonce
is better than a misnomer.

* Latin for Broken Bridge

------
saithound
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 mathematicians do tend to think about terminology quite
frequently: communicating with other scientist and mathematicians is a major
part of doing science, and "the reviewers couldn't follow your argument" is a
valid, and not especially rare reason for rejected articles in mathematics.
Given the amount of thought put into it, "intuitive" names do tend to come
about when possible (as it happened with what we now call the Ham Sandwich
theorem, the concept of Fibration, the Squeeze Lemma, and countless others).

Given that mathematicians do put thought into terminology, there's often a
good reason for not having more intuitive names: maybe no good common-sense
intuition was available (e.g. Chu constructions are too general for this sort
of thing), or the thing comes up only in highly specialized contexts where
it's not worth bothering with it (e.g. Girard's paradox), or there are too
many different metaphors that one would have to invoke to describe the
situation appropriately, so that it's more efficient to derive a completely
new term from an associated name (e.g. Abelian became such an adjective, which
now has its own associations).

It's telling that the author criticizes terms like "Calabi-Yau manifold", but
doesn't suggest any alternative: coming up with an insightful name that
communicates the key properties of such an object, and is easier to use and
remember than "Calabi-Yau" is, let's just say, very very hard.

The same phenomenon is not limited to mathematics. Would Dijkstra's algorithm,
the Haber–Bosch process or the Otto cycle be easier to learn and remember if
they had snappy, insightful names? Probably. But the same concerns apply. It's
hard to come up with genuinely better, more descriptive names for these
processes. And even if we were successful in popularizing newer, better names,
we would find that the names were not the real bottlenecks that made computer
science, chemistry or mechanical engineering difficult to master.

~~~
i_cannot_hack
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It also made me think of sorting algorithms, which all have wonderfully
> snappy and descriptive names.@@

Well, bubble, shell, insertion and merge, sure. Quick less so. And then there
is Tim...

~~~
thaumasiotes
What? Shell sort isn't a descriptive name. The algorithm is named after Donald
Shell, and has nothing to do with shells.

~~~
xdavidliu
kind of reminds me of the Heaviside function, which is a step function. When I
first learned about it in school, I thought it was named after the "heavy
side" on the right, as opposed to the "light side" on the left. Turns out that
Oliver Heaviside was an actual person.

~~~
dllthomas
Nagle's Algorithm is named after a person. It helps make sure more data is
sent together, rather than split across unnecessarily many packets.

I recently learned that in Polish, "nagle" can mean "all at once" \- not
pronounced the same, but still a cute coincidence!

------
woopwoop
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 know about this name at first. For a convex set K,
this is the limit, as R goes to infinity, of Bar(K + B(0,R)), where Bar(L)
denotes the barycenter of L. This is the unique continuous map S on convex
sets with the two properties

(i) S(K) is in K for all K

(ii) S(aK + bL) = a S(K) + b S(L).

It is also the map on convex sets satisfying (i) which has the smallest
possible Lipschitz constant when the space of compact convex sets is endowed
with the Hausdorff metric.

It took me a while to get a thorough enough grasp on the literature to learn
these things, though, because when you Google "Steiner point", you mostly get
stuff about a triangle center, also named after Steiner, which is a totally
different concept. It's not that I thought this other triangle center was the
Steiner curvature centroid, it was that I literally didn't know what to search
for in order to get results on the Steiner point I was interested in.

~~~
abnry
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.

~~~
woopwoop
But at the time I didn't know the phrase "Steiner curvature centroid", I just
knew "Steiner point". The definition I knew was not in terms of the curvature,
or in the terms I gave above, but as a certain integral of the support
function.

As an aside, the Steiner curvature centroid has a perfectly reasonable
interpretation in terms of the "curvature" of a triangle. For a convex set in
the plane with smooth boundary, the Steiner curvature centroid is equal to the
barycenter of the probability measure on the boundary weighted proportionally
to the curvature. Given a triangle, take a sequence of smooth convex sets
converging in Hausdorff metric to the triangle, and the limit of the Steiner
points of these will converge to the following thing: the average of the
vertices of the triangle weighted proportionally to pi - the angle. This is
the analogue of the barycenter of the curvature-weighted perimeter for
triangles.

~~~
abnry
The thrust of the original article's point is that more descriptive names for
theorems and definitions is better. "Steiner curvature centroid" is more
descriptive than "Steiner Point", and by the metric of being able to Google
for relevant information, it is indeed better.

I see now, rereading, that you were in fact making two points. First, that
understanding the definition dwarfs learning the name. (I'd argue that a
better name won't make you instantly understand a definition, but it can help
but the very example of Steiner point vs Steiner curvature centroid.) Second,
that sometimes multiple defintions and theorems are named for the same person,
which causes confusion. So you were making a for-and-against argument.

------
valw
Here we see the classic tension between _synthetic_ names and _natural_ names.

The best discussion I've seen of this topic is in the 1st chapter (which is
fortunately freely accessible and concise) of this excellent programming book:

[https://leanpub.com/elementsofclojure/read_sample](https://leanpub.com/elementsofclojure/read_sample)

Relevant excerpt:

> Most natural names have a rich, varied collection of senses.3 To avoid
> ambiguity we must use synthetic names, which have no intuitive sense in the
> context of our code.

> Category theory is a rich source of synthetic names. ‘Monad’, to most
> readers, means nothing. As a result, we can define it to mean anything.
> Synthetic names turn comprehension into a binary proposition: either you
> understand it or you don’t. Between experts, synthetic names can be used to
> communicate without ambiguity. Novices are forced to either learn or walk
> away.

> Conversely, a natural name is at first understood as one of its many senses.
> Everyone understands, more or less, what an id is. In a large group,
> however, these understandings might have small but important differences.
> These understandings are refined, and gradually converge, through
> examination of the documentation and code. At the cost of some ambiguity,
> novices are able to participate right away.

> Natural names allow every reader, novice or expert, to reason by analogy.
> Reasoning by analogy is a powerful tool, especially when our software models
> and interacts with the real world. Synthetic names defy analogies,4 and
> prevent novices from understanding even the basic intent behind your code.
> Choose accordingly.

------
parsimo2010
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4hler_manifold)

Two of those things are not named after a person, and none of them are
understandable without special training. Naming something after a person
doesn't make it any harder to understand unless there are multiple things
named after that person and you can't figure out which they mean from the
context.

In case you're wondering about those structures, here is what Wikipedia has to
say about them:

\- A Riemannian manifold "is a real, smooth manifold, M, equipped with a
positive-definite inner product g_p on the tangent space T_p M at each point
p."

\- "A complex manifold is a manifold with an atlas of charts to the open unit
disk in C^n, such that the transition maps are holomorphic."

\- "A symplectic manifold is a smooth manifold, M, equipped with a closed
nondegenerate differential 2-form ω, called the symplectic form."

The only thing in the above descriptions accessible to non-specialists is
probably that the Riemannian manifold is probably named after that guy that
they heard of in calculus class. Let's not get rid of our ability to honor
people in a failed attempt to make the communication more effective. You can
call a Riemannian manifold or a Kähler manifold whatever you want, but it's
not going to prevent someone from having to spend years before they are able
to understand them.

~~~
abnry
> 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.

~~~
chongli
What's so toxic about honouring a long-dead mathematician? The article praises
the Ancient Greeks and how they named things after their teachers. That, to
me, is far more problematic. The history and the effort that went into
developing the theorems of geometry presented by Euclid's Elements are all
lost. Now we only know about Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes, and maybe a few
others.

On the other hand, we know far more about the lives of Fermat, Euler, Gauss,
Riemann, and Newton. While we can't owe all of the work of historians to
eponymous topics, the use of their names in everyday mathematics helps to keep
their memory alive so that new generations of people may be interested in
learning about the history of mathematics.

~~~
abnry
To me, learning the mathematics is more important than learning the history,
although the history is very interesting.

As for long-dead mathematicians... theorems are still being named to this day
for living people. I think the glory we attach to discoverer of the
mathematics diminishes the glory of the mathematics.

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

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

~~~
elondaits
Not everything is easy to Google:

C, D, F, R, COM, .NET, node ...

~~~
Someone
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](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…”_ )

------
atrettel
I have often found eponyms confusing and I try to avoid them when a good
alternative exists. Take "Gibbs free energy" as an example. I had trouble
remembering what it is compared to "Helmholtz free energy", but then I learned
that "Gibbs free energy" is actually "free enthalpy", at which point I could
remember it more easily. Perhaps my point isn't that eponyms are bad, per se,
but that it is much better to have descriptive names if possible, and better
yet to have self-discoverable and structured names.

Stigler's law [1] also exists, and I have found far too many eponyms to be
named after people who had nothing to do with the concept (and sometimes they
did not want their name attached to it even).

Eponyms have the advantage of being short and simple. Descriptive names can be
pretty wordy. Take "Mach number" as an example. Surely I can call it the
"ratio of the velocity to the speed of sound", but that's pretty much the
definition at that point. "Mach number" saves a lot of space. Terms like
"sonic number" or "sonic ratio" could also work, but everyone already knows
what the "Mach number" is, so there is no point in introducing a new word
needlessly and sowing confusion (in my opinion).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy)

------
evanpw
I fear the alternative would be all the good names becoming heavily
overloaded:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal).

------
mehrdadn
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 integral

~~~
OskarS
Another example is Abelian groups, which should just be called commutative
groups.

Though that example brings up a decent counterargument to the thesis:
”groups”, ”rings” and ”fields” all have descriptive names, but that doesn’t
help a bit, they’re still mad confusing. They’d almost be easier to pick apart
if they were named after people.

~~~
mehrdadn
+1 for commutative groups.

Interesting point! So like we'd rename group theory to Galois theory? :)

------
asperous
I think the reason is that the concepts are so abstract, no concrete word
makes sense. So in the face of an arbitrary choice people use names.

The situation isn't much better in computer science, where now when you look
up half the simple nouns in the dictionary, you get some language, tool, or
javascript library claiming it.

~~~
didibus
Exactly, if you pick a name that kinda sorta describes the concept, but not
really because it's a very precise abstract technical concept and actually has
no real parallel with day to day mondaine life, it doesn't actually help
people understand the concept. Often time it actually gives them the wrong
impression.

I think beginners are looking for shortcuts, can I reduce this complicated
thing into something I already know? And the truth is, you can't, if you
could, it would be a trivial concept and there'd probably be nothing
interesting about it to learn in the first place.

~~~
aeternum
It seems like very few concepts are truly unique. At the very least, they have
some relation to other concepts so it would be advantageous to make up a
name/word that is similar to an existing concept.

~~~
didibus
Why? It's not the same concept, just vaguely similar to some other thing. But
all of the interesting aspects are in the difference, otherwise we wouldn't
bother mathematically with the concept in the first place.

Similar != Same

And treating similar things as same is the source of a lot of error and
confusion and misinterpretation.

If its just to help a beginner at first with a little bit of understanding,
you can just say X is a bit like Y, but also very different in really
important ways so forget most of what you assume about X, because Y does not
work like X, even though it has relations to it.

~~~
aeternum
Many breakthroughs now require cross-disciplinary collaboration. We're
unnecessarily increasing the barrier to entry. Imagine if with programming we
did away with simple type names like integer, decimal, character, string and
instead called them the Karson Couch, Aisling Mcniel, Elmer Enriquez, Alton
Francis, and George Boole?

Of course people could learn them eventually.. but what's the advantage? It's
much easier to understand the relationship between an unsigned & signed
integer vs. a Karson and an Aisling.

I experienced a form of this firsthand when interning at IBM quite awhile ago.
They used unnecessary acronyms for everything and it was amazing how much it
slowed down onboarding compared to other tech companies. Even for the regular
employees it was crazy how much time was wasted at meetings and e-mail back &
forth clarifying needless abbreviations.

------
aaron-santos
The lack of eponymous names used in category theory, for example, do nothing
to aid in learning it. The term functor is no more descriptive than Carnap
mapping.

~~~
gnodar
No more descriptive, but IMO more memorable.

~~~
magicalhippo
If it's not descriptive, then memorable is a good substitute.

Been many years since I went to uni and haven't used much of the math since,
but I still recall the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, what the Kronecker product
is and how to do Taylor expansion.

------
lixtra
Some profiling would show that names increase the difficulty of math by
0.001%. I don’t see an issue here.

~~~
colah3
I'm curious if you feel the same way about programming -- do bad variable and
function names only increase the difficult of understanding someone else's
code or library by 0.001%?

~~~
mehrdadn
This isn't about variable names and functions though. Math has those too, but
the proposal isn't to change those. In programming we don't call a C compiler
a Ritchie Hopper (or whatever).

------
markgall
I agree that this article is basically preposterous. But there is a grain of
truth in it.

The foundations of algebraic geometry were basically rewritten in the 1960s by
Alexander Grothendieck, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the 20th
century. He found names to be extremely important, and many of the basic
objects that he developed have very carefully conceived and suggestive names:
schemes, stacks, topoi, etale morphisms, dessins d'enfant,... none of which
will I attempt to define here. But all of these have stuck.

On the other hand, things other than the foundations of the subject? Sure,
name it after who did it. Suggestive names aren't really possible for most
stuff.

------
gourlaysama
This seems to misrepresent why people bother naming things. It's not like
mathematicians are spending their time randomly naming every
object/property/structure/... they encounter just for the sake of it.

A "Kähler manifold" exists, as a name, because there is no way to fully
describe what it is (and bring forward in the reader all the corresponding
context) in two or three words. Using a long sentence (full of things that
could themselves be artificial labels, recursively) instead would be a waste
of everyone's time.

If one can use a short descriptive name for something, then it's not a name,
it's just the thing, and everyone refer to it directly. And when you can't, or
when you want to indicate its importance, or you want to neatly package all
the relevant context about it, all the mathematical baggage that should come
with it in something short, then the pretty obvious thing to do it to abstract
it away and stick a label on top.

It doesn't really matter whether they use mathematicians, flower names or
characters from The Lord of The Rings, as long as it's unique enough, in
context, then it's fine. The names become part of the vocabulary of the field,
just as much as supposed "descriptive" names. All those "descriptive" names
have to be precisely defined too anyway, because they carry natural-language
connotations, assumptions, and so on, that just don't apply.

~~~
davidivadavid
Uniqueness of names is definitely important — the question is can we do
better?

If all we want is uniqueness, we could just number theorems and concepts using
GUIDs.

Might as well abdicate and embrace the fact math is going to be automated, and
all mathematical objects are just abstract constructs devoid of meaning that
can be referred to by arbitrary labels.

But it seems like there's more to it.

The names of mathematicians are interesting for the genealogy of theorems...
but they're also completely opaque about their semantics.

Is it not possible to think a system could make math more intuitive by relying
on a more structured nomenclature?

------
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

------
drichel
> "In the last decade, the field of algebraic geometry was set on fire by
> “perfectoid spaces” rather than “Scholze spaces” because Peter Scholze kept
> on calling them that in his talks and papers."

Skip to 5:10 to see Peter Scholze apologize for the name:
[https://youtu.be/J0QdTYZIfIM](https://youtu.be/J0QdTYZIfIM)

------
8note
An important thing for name sis that you want them to be immutable because
it's hard to refactor both all the writing using that name, and everyone's
memory to change the concept of a spheroid from one definition to another.

This makes it hard to choose generic names from the get-go since the first
person to use name might not attach it to the best concept for it, making it
unavailable for the best concept for the name to describe.

\-----

I've always imagined people's names in concept names to be a shorthand for the
papers that defined them. Eg. "Calabi-yau manifold" is just another way to
write "manifolds as described by calabi and Yau in <well known paper>" and
importing all the detailed definitions from that paper. To get the same from
properties from a generic name, you need to get a canonical definition that
everyone agrees with

~~~
lambdatronics
Yeah, arguably geometric algebra and algebraic geometry should switch labels.
Algebraic geometry is geometric techniques for solving polynomials (algebra)
so it should really be geometric algebra. OTOH, geometric algebra is an
algebraic formulation of geometry -- so that should be algebraic geometry.
_shrugs_

~~~
DreamScatter
I work with geometric algebra (I'm the developer of Grassmann.jl) and I
disagree, I don't think it matters whether the two topics change their name.

------
Grustaf
The fact that mathematics honors the people that built it is one of the things
I love the most about it.

But speaking practically, it’s by far the beat option in many cases. There
might be a small number of basic concepts (like dodecahedron or inverse) that
can be given actually descriptive names, but for anything even slightly
complex it’s impossible, so we end up with a mixture of almost nonsensical and
often confusing “descriptive” names, and concepts named after people.

Is it harder to remember and distinguish “Hamiltonian”, “Dirac delta” or
“Lagranian” than “cohomology”, “homomorphic” and “homeomorphic”?

Having said that, in many cases the names are quite evocative, like “fibre-
bundle”.

~~~
palae
> Is it harder to remember and distinguish “Hamiltonian”, “Dirac delta” or
> “Lagranian” than “cohomology”, “homomorphic” and “homeomorphic”?

While I agree with your overall point, I must note that you did write
Lagranian instead of Lagrangian ;)

~~~
Grustaf
Ah you got me. Although those Greek and Latin names aren’t always trivial to
spell either!

------
moomin
If you think plain English words help with this, try either explaining what a
compact space is or a normal subgroup. Or, if you don’t know, figure it out
from the descriptions on the internet.

And these are not hard concepts as far as maths goes.

------
firebaze
Complex things cannot be explained easily. As such, from this perspective, it
doesn't matter if a complex topic is named by a person or by some abstract,
ridiculously compressed word describing an aspect of it.

But on the other hand, names are simply irrelevant. Anything is better than a
name of a person, even if that person was brilliant. The person may be
remembered as an aspect of some discovery (say, Einstein), but the concept as
such should have some distinct name, not tainted by history, or mere human
lifetimes. It should transcend existence as experienced by a human.

~~~
lambdatronics
We've got at least one physicist in our corner:

"Hestenes is adamant about calling this mathematical approach “geometric
algebra” and its extension “geometric calculus,” rather than referring to it
as “Clifford algebra”."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hestenes#Geometric_algeb...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hestenes#Geometric_algebra_and_calculus)

Unfortunately, this should really be called algebraic geometry, but that name
is already taken by another field...

~~~
DreamScatter
Come on, switching geometric algebra and algebraic geometry makes no
difference.

------
YetAnotherNick
I disagree. There are only few cases in which you can describe a mathematical
concept with few meaningful words. Like this is the list of number types I
could think of. If you don't know it, there is no benefit of knowing what it
is called in English. Are rational numbers rational, and are imaginary numbers
imaginary? Can the author come up with better name than this, I doubt so.

    
    
        Rational numbers
        Real numbers
        Imaginary numbers
        Complex numbers(including imaginary numbers)
        Hypercomplex numbers
        Hyper real numbers
        Surreal numbers

~~~
davidivadavid
Rational numbers are ratios.

------
bmurray7jhu
David Hilbert was so prolific that one of his eponymous theorems was also
numbered: _Hilbert 's Theorem 90_.

~~~
davidivadavid
Jean-Pierre Serre has a fun talk where he says that to write mathematics
badly, you can write papers called "A proof of a theorem of Euler", the idea
being that there are so many that the title gives 0 information.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECQyFzzBHlo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECQyFzzBHlo)

------
bikenaga
I recall Paul Halmos
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Halmos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Halmos))
once advocated for naming things in mathematics _descriptively_ rather than
_honorifically_. I recall his argument was that it aids in recall and
understanding to name descriptively, and that there are better ways to honor
discoverers.

I found this statement in "How to Write Mathematics"
([https://bookstore.ams.org/hwm](https://bookstore.ams.org/hwm)):

"... surely I cannot stop without a discourse on the proper naming of concepts
(why 'commutator' is good and 'set of the first category' is bad) and the
proper way to baptize theorems (why 'the closed graph theorem' is good and
'the Cauchy-Buniakowksy-Schwarz theorem' is bad)."

I _thought_ he'd said more in "I Want to be a Mathematician"
([https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387960784](https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387960784)),
but I just looked through the book and couldn't find anything. (Halmos was a
particularist, and thought very highly of examples, and "I Want to be a
Mathematician" has examples/opinions of how to do nearly everything in the
profession, from teaching to writing to being a department chair to giving
talks to doing research ... He was _very_ opinionated, but also specific and
absolutely clear, so at least if you disagree with him you know what you're
disagreeing about.)

------
krick
Well, unless Hairy Ball Theorem is called after her, I don't think it's up to
her to decide, what mathematicians "should" do. Jeez, these journalists
researching "computational morality"...

To be fair, I do actually think some math jargon is unnecessarily complex and
we could do better, and that it _is_ something that actually matters. And I
_do_ think, for instance, that "commutative group" is better than "abelian
group", since it is descriptive, unlike the latter. But this rarely is the
culprit. Kähler manifold is called after Kähler, because he is the one who
introduced such a thing, and we don't really have any better name to describe
it. (And it wasn't Kähler who named it after himself too.) Can she propose a
better name? I'm curious to hear it, but she conveniently skips that issue in
her musings. If not, this whole argument of hers is just silly, as is thinking
that "monster group" is a "cool name". It is not cool, it's rather awful, it's
called that precisely because we don't have a clue WTF this thing is, and I
sincerely hope that some 300 years later we'll have a much better
understanding of group theory to rewrite all that stuff and to see that
"monster group" is not such a "monster" after all, but quite a natural thing,
that can be described conveniently and assigned some proper name.

So if we want to improve the landscape, let's rather start small, by
abandoning π in favor of ½τ. Let's see how many centuries that will take.

~~~
WoahNoun
A Kahler manifold is just a complex manifold with both a Riemann metric and a
sympletic (Hamiltonian) form. It's not a rare class of manifolds and while the
"adjective" Kahler has come to mean those properties. Why not call it a
Reimann-Hamilton manifold if we care so much about the "history"?

~~~
krick
> Kähler manifold is a bad name, stop naming things after each other!

> Why not call it a Reimann-Hamilton manifold

I'm not sure if this is top-notch sarcasm or not, but I'll upvote just to be
safe.

~~~
WoahNoun
I'm not suggesting that name. I'd prefer it was called a symplectic smooth
inner product manifold. I'm merely pointing out the hypocrisy of the "name it
after the discoverer argument"

------
ezoe
If it's unique name, it's fine. What I don't like it is math notations. Many
math notations requires complex typesetting and layout which cannot be
expressed in the plain text. It may be not much of a problem when math
notations were written by hand, but not anymore in the age of computer.

The mathematicians should have invented and standardise the notation that can
be expressed as the plaintext decades ago.

------
Octoth0rpe
Sounds reasonable. Let's call this new policy "Ball's Law".

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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!

~~~
abnry
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.

------
tazedsoul
Also, naming things is hard. If the things you are naming are specific
concepts, and the conclusions reachable by reasoning about such concepts are
highly sensitive; that is highly dependent upon such specificity, then the
problem of naming things is even harder. I think this may be because what is
hard about mathematics is the degree to which specificity matters. The names
are just pointers to ideas, and these ideas are often unique but similar to
one another, with differences that matter. It’s as if in naming a mathematical
concept we are performing a compression algorithm on an object of great
detail. A loss of information is expected. Of course, this process is an art
form. Are some names easier to remember than others? Are there good names? Bad
names? Of course. But I do think generalizing that “naming ideas based off
people is bad” to all cases is a bad idea — rather a mixed approach is
fruitful.

------
gxs
This is the nature of mathematics.

Statements and theorems are extremely dense with information, where every word
might have a it's own area of study.

Of a problem may begin with something benign like, the following function is
blah blah, but even then, the term function is well defined, and you may need
to know the intricacies of functions to be able to solve the problem.

------
muzani
I think good naming convention is something like Chesterton's Fence. "Fence"
describes the idea well, and "Chesterton's" makes it unique.

Something like "Djikstra's Algorithm" is too vague. Maybe if it were something
like "Djikstra's Path", it would be easier to understand.

------
hprotagonist
meanwhile, fields that do feel at liberty to come up with “common word names”
usually wind up reinventing 18 names for the same goddamn thing. ML/data
science/statistics is notoriously bad at this.

It took me about 3 months to realize that i’d known what “ReLu activation” was
for a decade by another established name.

------
IshKebab
> 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 don't think medicine or law are the best examples to use here unless you
think Sarbanes-Oxley or the anterior medial malleolar artery are well named.

------
karxxm
Please give me only one example how one can come up with a single name for a
complex mathematical concept. There are so many details, that the naming can
never be precise enough to be useful. But they need to be named. So why not by
their inventors?

------
valand
Name is like a pointer to an information for people to access.

I think when people name things, unless they are very narcistic, should be
having that sole purpose in mind.

This comment by xamuel relatably describes what people usually do when naming
things
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24386695](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24386695)

> Rather, what really happens is that mathematicians are a community, and they
> refer to things in whatever way is convenient. Davis's colleague refers to
> such-and-such theorem as "Davis's Theorem" not because of some committee on
> naming, but rather because they were there at the conference where Davis
> announced the theorem, and everyone at said conference excitedly talked
> about "Davis's Theorem" for the whole rest of the conference because it was
> so exciting.

The arguments that say names should be self descriptive is only a part of the
discussion.

There's the name overloading problem, where we only have a limited set of
existing descriptor which can cause two object name to conflict.

There's the memorability aspect.

There's the homophonic / homographic problem where multiple names could be
perceived differently.

There's the complexity aspect. The more complex an information, the harder it
is to write an accurate name.

There's context aspect.

There's the extreme connotation aspect. Some words triggers extreme emotional
response to someone.

There's the dependency aspect where people have been using a name for years.

All in all, naming things are hard problem. But the important thing is naming
things should be done for the sake of naming things in mind. If naming things
is done primarily for other agenda, like someone's glory, the result might be
questionable.

Assuming that people are naming things for the right cause, problems that
arise from names should not be attributed to naming process. For example the
article author's problem might be simply caused by the complexity of the
information referred by the name.

Edit: grammar and formatting

------
ampdepolymerase
Compensation in academia is already bad enough. Take away the boosts to the
ego and you are going to make the politics even more toxic, and potentially
cripple an entire generation.

------
tazedsoul
I’m not opposed to naming things after people. That said, I often suspect that
the naming conventions and rituals of mathematicians (and sometimes
physicists) serve as gatekeeping mechanisms that make life extra difficult for
newcomers to a field while preserving the authority of current experts in a
field by turning their history and duration of involvement into a more
powerful resource than it probably deserves.

------
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.

------
dmckeon
The pattern of using eponyms instead of descriptives is also recognized in
medicine: [https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2020/01/30/eponym-debate-
the-...](https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2020/01/30/eponym-debate-the-case-for-
biologically-descriptive-names/)

------
superhuzza
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.

~~~
abnry
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem)

~~~
d2v
> The two-dimensional variant of the theorem (also known as the pancake
> theorem) can be proved by an argument which appears in the fair cake-cutting
> literature

This is the first time that reading about math has made me hungry.

------
alpple
I think the optimal or universal language is more difficult in practice than
in idealism. Reading is the art of sorting through the mess in any field, and
acquiring context. I think a lot of this underestimates the complexity and
nuance of language for any field.

------
mikewarot
The alternative is common words meaning different things, depending on field
or specialty. Case in point:

Entropy

~~~
davidivadavid
Which is actually helpful because it potentially helps build bridges and
analogies between fields by recognizing similar constructs?

------
timkam
Humans are social beings. An abstract concept that is named after its human
creator establishes an immediate link to this person. My guess is that many
people like this, because it adds a social dimension to otherwise "dry",
technical papers.

------
mdonahoe
Maybe I misinterpreted what the author is trying to say by using Conway as an
example, but I don’t think Conway discovered the Monster group. He credits
Fischer and Griess.

Conway just referred to it as a monster while corresponding with Fischer and
the name stuck.

------
seles
There's an equally annoying problem in software engineering at large
corporations (aka Google), where hundreds of services you need to know about
are named with some cute name that gives you no idea what the thing actually
is.

~~~
wenc
For AWS, there's a website called "AWS in Plain English" that explain what
each service does. For instance, it's pretty hard to guess what AWS Route53
does unless you've come across it elsewhere.

[https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-
english/](https://expeditedsecurity.com/aws-in-plain-english/)

Azure naming is comparatively more pedestrian.

~~~
matthewfelgate
Thanks for sharing. That's actually really useful.

------
j45
The focus on mathematicians naming things (possibly for legacy) seems similar
to the politicians venerating each others with statues.

And of course... naming remains one of the hardest things to do in any field.

------
rosywoozlechan
You know, why don't you discover some new ridiculously hard thing and then you
get to decide to not name it after yourself? This level of entitlement is
beyond the pale.

------
ineedasername
This is not a naming problem. In fact the naming is consistent: There's a
base-case "manifold". Another one build on top of it; another one build on top
of that second one, etc.

This is precisely how knowledge is built, one thing on top of another. Naming
would not have solved this "manifold" issue, in fact in would have obscured
the root of that bit of knowledge.

In short, the author's real problem isn't names, is that they don't fully
appreciate the way knowledge is built with ever more complex layers of
abstraction.

------
kepler1
Oh thank god. I thought the point was going to be that naming things after
people was discriminatory to women and minorities.

------
rajbiswas125
Naming this is things is hard.

Also many of the people who are doing their PhD dream of one day having a
theorm named after them.

------
xg15
IT equivalent: Obscure shell commands with one-letter flags and a manpage that
really wanted to be a novel.

------
NashHallucinate
>Polish Mathematicians never getting things named after them because their
names were too hard to spell

------
matthewmorgan
Yeah let's stop reminding people that it was mostly white men who invented
everything

------
gridlockd
Meh. Shaka, when the walls fell.

------
chromatin
This article really betrays a lack of deep understanding of the concepts
involved.

------
Grustaf
I’d suggest that people that prefer “descriptive” names should come up with
clever descriptive names the next time they invent a new mathematical concept
or prove a new theorem. I’m quite sure nobody will try to stop you.

------
anu7df
if you think maths is bad you should take a look at geology. At least
mathematicians stick to their names or names of other mathematicians.

------
prvc
See also:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382438)

------
kaetemi
And more descriptive variable names would be handy too. The whole field seems
optimized towards obfuscation.

------
bengale
Do the work and you can name it whatever you want.

------
Xlurker
Humans are vain, it's just how it is.

------
vertbhrtn
This is some mediocre people came up with idea that they could easily
understand what Calabi-Yau manifold is, if only mathematicians defined it with
simple plain words. They don't like the idea that such a full definition would
be 1000 pages long, full of complex concepts.

------
dheera
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 trips up my mental English parser when someone says "the
Hamiltonian" and I'm always like "the Hamiltonian what? what is or isn't
Hamiltonian?"

~~~
mattkrause
You could just write out “Hamiltonian {operator, path, system, etc}, but it’s
not uncommon for adjective+nouns to be shortened to just the adjective when
it’s obvious from context.

If you want good Italian [food], you might ask an Italian [person] to
translate some Italian [text] you saw in a restaurant review.

------
footballnate29
Why. They spend all that time dedicating their life to their research. They
deserve to name shit after themselves?

------
acd
Strongly Disagree!

You name things after who discovered it. In these case you name it after
mathematicians like Newton, Euler, Turing, Gödel. For me its some sort of
ignorance if you do not honor the one who discovered it.

Other sciences has it too named after persons Fahrenheit, Celsius, Pascal etc.

~~~
davidivadavid
Were tables invented by Mr/Mrs Table? Bottles by Mr/Mrs Bottle?

~~~
photonemitter
Were they not?

------
petermcneeley
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](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html)

~~~
jmeister
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.

~~~
klyrs
This is a _classical_ example of attacking the very weakest form of one's
arguments. Not even addressing the content in the article, but fabricating a
strawman instead. I mean, good on ya for speaking up, your parent just spoke
in vague terms about the possible existence of a strawman.

And let's look at that pg article. Is discussing the ergonomics of naming
things in math taboo? Is it taboo for everybody, or just people of certain
demographics?

