Comment on Say no to BAYES
wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 5 days agoQuality shit post, but the naming thing is true of virtually everything in mathematics, with good reason, because otherwise you’d just be talking about “that slightly different combination of arbitrary letters by which we do something very similar, but measurably distinct, from the use cases of the other three equations like it”.
See:
- Pythagorean theorem (geometry)
- Dijkstra’s Algorithm (graph theory)
- Fermat’s last theorem (number theory)
- Peano axioms (formal logic)
- For that matter, the word “Algorithm” comes from the Latinised name of the dude who invented algebra, and the word “algebra” is just an overly a truncated version of the title of that dude’s book.
This is also doubly true in science, where there are 5000 different “laws” and “theorems” surrounding something like gas behaviour, so at some point, you have to differentiate them based on their history, rather than what they do. Hence “Charles’ law”, “Boyle’s law”, “Gay-Lussac’s law”, “Bernoulli’s principle”, the “navier-stokes theorem”, etc…
edinbruh@feddit.it 5 days ago
I’ll admit that was a bit of a stretch. But I also think the naming thing is a problem. Especially in mathematics, even when it is not named after a person, you often have no clue about what it is from just the name (i.e. what do you think is a magma in mathematics?)
wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
I believe that they contribute to understanding, because human minds are wired to engage with stories. If your chemistry teacher was worth their salt, they’d teach you Gay-Lussac’s law by telling you about how, when the hot air balloon was first invented, Gay-Lussac was seen as mad by all of the older scientists for wanting to go up in one. Well, not only did he nearly die making measurements, he also showed that, at higher altitudes, there was lower pressure and lower temperature. Then, your chemistry teacher should pull out a spray-can of keyboard cleaner, invert it, spray the liquid into a beaker, and let everyone feel the adiabatic temperature depression from expansion.
edinbruh@feddit.it 5 days ago
Now that I think about it, I think my teacher called it just “lussac’s law” because you cannot pronounce “Gay-Lussac” in front of a classroom of 14 year old boys. I guess you are right about the stories, but I’m not sure the name actually helps with that