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Comment by lixtra | Hacker News Reader

Some profiling would show that names increase the difficulty of math by 0.001%. I don’t see an issue here.

Like it's not the names that scare me, it's the definition they represent. The fact that the name isn't descriptive doesn't seem like a big problem when the definition has oodles of nuance. Granted I only have an undergrad in math so I can't quite speak to the experience of academics, but then the article is cherry picked too.

All the examples given are of trivial things. Isoceles triangles and Fermat's last theorem. Both things you can explain in a sentence.

Let's look at something with "mnemonic names": groups, rings and fields. Quickly by just looking at the name which one is the most generic and which most specific.

Maths already involves a ludicrous amount of rote memorization, I'm not sure that using some guy's name is the hard problem. Internalizing all its nuance is.

I'm curious if you feel the same way about programming -- do bad variable and function names only increase the difficult of understanding someone else's code or library by 0.001%?

This isn't about variable names and functions though. Math has those too, but the proposal isn't to change those. In programming we don't call a C compiler a Ritchie Hopper (or whatever).

Do you have a suggestion for how you would make a measurement like that?

It seems like the experimental procedure would require definitions at least several layers deep, the control based on real names and experimental group based another metric. Maybe the experimental groups names would be more closely tied to the structure of the math they were naming though that seems challenging.

I studied math in foreign languages, sometimes names are different (French, Russian) and it never caused a problem (except for the first encounter).

> 0.001%

How did you come up with this number? You took 100,000 samples and 99,999 of them agreed? I don't personally know 100,000 mathematicians.

I first estimated 1% but decided that that is much too high.

But let’s make an experiment. Let an average high school student memorize these names:

A Calabi-Yau manifold is a compact, complex Kähler manifold with a trivial first Chern class.

And now let her explain what the above definition is about.

If anything, naming them after people (especially people with uncommon names) makes them easier to google.

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