Ironically PG founded Ycombinator, which is "an implementation of a fixed-point combinator in lambda calculus"
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The company wasn't called Y Combinator yet. At first we called it Cambridge Seed. But that name never saw the light of day, because by the time we announced it a few days later, we'd changed the name to Y Combinator. We realized early on that what we were doing could be national in scope and we didn't want a name that tied us to one place.
The Y combinator is one of the coolest ideas in computer science. It's also a metaphor for what we do. It's a program that runs programs; we're a company that helps start companies.
I want to say that I read somewhere -- maybe in comments on HN -- that the Lamda part of that is also a reference to the starting letter for Lisp which stuck in my mind due to the mostly forgotten two quarters of Greek I had eons ago. But I'm super short of sleep and can't be arsed to go digging for more explanations/citations for why it got the name it got as random crap to do on a Saturday afternoon while failing to be productive due to the aforementioned lack of sleep.
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The company wasn't called Y Combinator yet. At first we called it Cambridge Seed. But that name never saw the light of day, because by the time we announced it a few days later, we'd changed the name to Y Combinator. We realized early on that what we were doing could be national in scope and we didn't want a name that tied us to one place.
http://www.paulgraham.com/ycstart.html
Why did you choose the name “Y Combinator?”
The Y combinator is one of the coolest ideas in computer science. It's also a metaphor for what we do. It's a program that runs programs; we're a company that helps start companies.
https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/
Then he named his startup incubator after a LISP function.
https://www.quora.com/How-did-Y-Combinator-get-its-name
I want to say that I read somewhere -- maybe in comments on HN -- that the Lamda part of that is also a reference to the starting letter for Lisp which stuck in my mind due to the mostly forgotten two quarters of Greek I had eons ago. But I'm super short of sleep and can't be arsed to go digging for more explanations/citations for why it got the name it got as random crap to do on a Saturday afternoon while failing to be productive due to the aforementioned lack of sleep.