Re:Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
by xg15 on Saturday September 05, 2020 @05:20PM
(#24386922)
> Once you get to the advanced levels of any field, terminology being "accessible" doesn't really matter, but being precise does.
If you really want to build knowledge barriers, then yes.
This might have been true decades ago when advanced academic concepts really might have been relevant for a small group of experts - but today, advanced math is the foundation of huge industries - and not everyone working with it can be assumed to have a formal education in the field: Often, you want to make use of an algorithm and simply need to know the concepts necessary to understand that algorithm.
Also, being precise doesn't have to mean being opaque - a name should give an uninformed reader at least enough information to roughly categorize the concept: Even "Timsort" is better than "Tim's algorithm", because this at least gives me a hint that I deal with a sorting algorithm.
If you really want to build knowledge barriers, then yes.
This might have been true decades ago when advanced academic concepts really might have been relevant for a small group of experts - but today, advanced math is the foundation of huge industries - and not everyone working with it can be assumed to have a formal education in the field: Often, you want to make use of an algorithm and simply need to know the concepts necessary to understand that algorithm.
Also, being precise doesn't have to mean being opaque - a name should give an uninformed reader at least enough information to roughly categorize the concept: Even "Timsort" is better than "Tim's algorithm", because this at least gives me a hint that I deal with a sorting algorithm.