this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 86 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (16 children)

Yeah, it's an in-group exclusivity signifier.

Shame, math is some of the worst at this, everything is named after some guy, so there's 0 semantic associativity, you either know exactly which Gaussian term they mean, or you are completely clueless even though they just mean noise with a normal distribution.

edit: Currently in a very inter-disciplinary field where the different mathematicians have their own language which has to be translated back into first software, then hardware. It's so confusing at first till you spend 30 minutes on wikipedia to realize they're just using an esoteric term to describe something you've used forever.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I really like the naming of things after their discoverers/inventors. I'm picturing a mathematician getting upset:

"How dare you speak about Friedrich Gauss like that. He dragged that universities astronomy department out of the stone age, even after the death of his first wife..."

The history of the people helps me with remembering the concepts.

Disclaimer: I am NOT a mathematician.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

My argument is not against naming things after the discoverer, though in engineering while we have some of this (Heaviside comes to mind), most other concepts have a semantic value so even unknown terms can be mapped fairly easily.

My main argument is that math is taught very poorly, if we had taught math as the history of math in school, this would be far more meaningful, we understand it as a story and each piece in the puzzle an event that brought it about.

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