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A comment on The Unplanned Impact of Mathematics. Parent comment

Re:The Unplanned Impact of Mathematics by ganzuul on Sunday July 05, 2020 @12:26PM (#23739832)
Symmetric is also good but it has a very distinct geometric interpretation. If we can avoid overloading terminology in a confusing way when designing these the names we should do so.

Perhaps pair-independent is a distinctive name for associative...

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Re:The Unplanned Impact of Mathematics by Someone on Sunday July 05, 2020 @05:18PM (#23742088)
Well, introducing the new term “Abelian” certainly avoids overloading terminology in a confusing way :-)

“Pair invariant” IMO, isn’t good, certainly worse than “Pairing invariant”. “Parentheses invariant” might work, but of course would get just as confusing/incorrect as “pair invariant” once one moves from groups to fields.

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Re:The Unplanned Impact of Mathematics by ganzuul on Monday July 06, 2020 @03:52AM (#23745637)
"Associative" doesn't provide any information to avoid confusion when dealing with mixed operators either.

Somehow including "peer" in the terminology could help.

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