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Sep 24, 2020

i continue to have no idea why this is but it’s always been weird to me how much better physicists are than mathematicians at naming things. mathematicians study “riemannian manifolds” or “shimura varieties” or whatever and physicists study “lasers” and “black holes” twitter.com/liminal_warmth

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

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@QiaochuYuan

i guess it’s kinda cute that mathematicians are so insistent on honoring other mathematicians by naming stuff after them but it gets old after awhile. there’s a lack of imagination to it. very few mathematicians who seriously try to name things good, except like conway

7:42 PM · Sep 24, 2020Twitter for iPad

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID

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the worst names in any scientific field i’m aware of are probably the ones in anatomy tho. “dorsolateral prefrontal cortex”? “thoracic vertebrae”? fuck off with that nonsense. it’s fucked up gatekeeping to give these high-falutin’ hoity-toity names to stuff everybody has

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Maybe also mathematicians don't like implying properties of things or relating to real life when it may not be justified. Like a black hole is so called because its key feature is not emitting light. And like a sigma field's important feature is just a few random definitions.

L. Amber O'Hearn

right here, right now

@ambimorph

Sep 25, 2020

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@QiaochuYuan

This is not how that happens. Things get named after people because the author was too modest to give their idea a name when they wrote about it. Sounds grandiose! Then when others get excited and start talking about it, they refer to it by the name and it sticks. I've seen it. -