Re:Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
by pbhjpbhj on Saturday September 05, 2020 @02:26PM
(#24385725)
Yes, agreed with the second part.
>"Why do mathematicians continue to proffer and accept this courtesy, when it increases their own mental load and makes their own work more opaque?" (the OP) //
I imagine because it doesn't increase their mental load? It might even reduce it; abstraction is a principle component of the field after all.
Using descriptive names sounds like it requires a half-arsed disabstraction, a series of munged verbose partial truths?
Naming for authors is partially self-documenting too, though practically that's probably not often useful.
Re:Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
by abnry on Saturday September 05, 2020 @03:03PM
(#24386048)
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].
Re:Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
by d2v on Saturday September 05, 2020 @03:23PM
(#24386193)
> 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.
Re:Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
by YetAnotherNick on Saturday September 05, 2020 @02:27PM
(#24385731)
And bad naming might even make things worse as the reader might get the wrong idea.
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.