Conversation

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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I think that's just different levels of difficulty. Even if they don't know the details, almost everyone knows what a laser or black hole is. Do they know about majorana representation of the dirac matrices? What about kaluza-klein theory? Signed: offended math guy

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

)

@QiaochuYuan

Sep 24, 2020

i am admittedly cherrypicking but i think if you look at broader patterns physicists are still winning. "spinor" was coined by a physicist and it's a very cool and good word. kaluza-klein theory is truly a name only a mathematician could love