Re:Mathematical Jargon Failures
by roelschroeven on Friday May 03, 2019 @08:04AM
(#19817598)
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.
By the way, did you know that broad-leaved trees are infinitely large during winter? The proof is really easy to do for yourself: In winter, those trees don't have any leaves, so all nodes must be inner nodes, and you can easily show by induction that the height of the tree must be infinite.
Well, the biological angle kind of makes sense if you think of it as taking the branches from a big tree, without the roots and successfully planting them in the ground individually. It doesn't quite work that way in practice, but if it did, you would get a small forest.
> In IT, if you take a tree and remove the root, the result is a forest. Biologists don't agree.
Unless it's Pando:
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.