Coincidental Mathematical Names
In two separate classes on the same day, I learned about the Heaviside Fucntion and the Poynting Vector.
The Heaviside Function is defined as: y = 0 for x < 0, y = 0.5 for x = 0, y = 1 for x > 0 So it looks like one side is “heavier.” However, it’s not named this way because it has a “heavy side,” it’s named after Mathematician Oliver Heaviside.
The Poynting Vector points in the direction of a ray of light. However, it’s named after John Henry Poynting, and not just because it’s job is to be “pointing” in a direction.
I was wondering if there are any other coincidental names like this in Math or Physics. I think it’s funny that people happen to find something that related to their last name.
The Schwarzschild radius and related terms. It is named after Karl Schwarzschild, but as a german-speaking person my first thoughts were: 'hmm, black shield radius, makes sense'.
To explain it a bit further, the Schwarzschild radius is the radius of the event horizon of a black hole. The last name of the astronomer who derived it, Karl Schwarzschild, literally translates to “black shield”.
That was the first example that came into my mind too. When I first learned about it, I had the same thoughts. Pretty funny coincidence.
I always wondered how exactly the Singleton bound related to one-element sets (or really, any meaning of the term "singleton"). Then I found out that it was named after Richard Singleton...
I tried looking for this but the Wikipedia page says nothing about it. Is there more information about this?
PageRank
PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. PageRank was named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. According to Google: PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is.
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one day i was just reading about this in a linear algebra text and i was like "...fuck"
What's even weirder is that he co-created it with a man called Gilbert Google
Not an English word, but there were the physicist Hendrik Lorentz - famous for contributions to special relativity like the Lorentz transformation - and the physicist/mathematician Ludvig Lorenz - also famous for some contributions to special relativity like the (Lorentz-invariant) Lorenz gauge.
They independently derived the same relation in optics, which is now known as Lorentz-Lorenz equation.
And neither of them have anything to do with this, which is just proof that there are entirely too many Loren[t]zes in physics/math/etc.
Lawrence Lorentz Lorenz Lorenzo?
I mean, it maximizes their chance of discovering a Theorem/Relation/Law/System/Gauge/...
Lorenz system
The Lorenz system is a system of ordinary differential equations first studied by Edward Lorenz. It is notable for having chaotic solutions for certain parameter values and initial conditions. In particular, the Lorenz attractor is a set of chaotic solutions of the Lorenz system which, when plotted, resemble a butterfly or figure eight.
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I remember misspelling l'Hôpital as le'hospital since that's how I remembered it and I got docked a mark for that. Now I'll always say it as le'hospital out of spite
That's a weird thing to dock a point for. The man himself probably spelt it l'Hospital. It was later that the spelling shifted to l'Hôpital after some changes to the French language.
The correct spelling is in fact "Hospital" (edit: well, "l'Hospital", the article is part of it). His name is from the time before the French language absorbed that 's' into the circumflex on the 'ô'.
The hat accent (accent circonflexe) in most cases signifies that an s was ommited at some point in the past, so it isn't that wrong.
The hat accent (accent circonflexe) in most cases signifies that an s was ommited at some point in the past, so it isn't that wrong.
Or they DO kill the metric? In the sense that (Lie) differentiating it in the Killing direction gives zero. (That’s how I always thought of the word association.)
Weird, this is exactly how I remember it too! Also that the Levi-Civita gives 0 in terms of the manifold’s tangent bundle when combining a vector with any other vector in the field. That wasn’t useful when I was taking a Diff Geom class, but I used a lot of Levi-Civita in my dissertation
There’s also the Killing form, which you could interpret as “killing off” nilpotent Lie Algebras (or parts of non-semisimple ones). Though, the name is a bit of a red herring, as it was first invented by Cartan (And I believe there might be something named after Cartan which is due to Killing as well, though I can’t remember what it is right now)
I thought I made that joke before on Reddit, in the style of Time Cube (treating either Lie groups or Lie algebras the same way Gene Ray treated linear time), but I couldn't find where I did it.
Apparently spectrum was named by Hilbert without even guessing the future applications in physics. I find this piece of fact quite wonderful.
"Hilbert himself was surprised by the unexpected application of this theory, noting that "I developed my theory of infinitely many variables from purely mathematical interests, and even called it 'spectral analysis' without any presentiment that it would later find application to the actual spectrum of physics."
Wow, I had always assumed that the nomenclature came from physics. That’s very cool.
Spectral theory
In mathematics, spectral theory is an inclusive term for theories extending the eigenvector and eigenvalue theory of a single square matrix to a much broader theory of the structure of operators in a variety of mathematical spaces. It is a result of studies of linear algebra and the solutions of systems of linear equations and their generalizations. The theory is connected to that of analytic functions because the spectral properties of an operator are related to analytic functions of the spectral parameter.
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I don't think this is as much a coincidence as it would seem although I don't know for certain. The word "spectrum" is used in physics to refer to many different types of collections of frequencies - light, sound, etc. Did Hilbert not name the spectrum of a Hilbert operator by analogy to one of these, via the study of frequncies of oscillation of solutions of linear differential equations? If so then the coincidence is only that the atomic spectrum arises from the spectrum of an operator on a Hilbert space, not that they are both called spectrum.
Well, in the above quote Hilbert himself claims to be surprised by this coincidence, so I would say at least a direct analogy was not on his mind when naming it.
In any case I think this is a spectacularly nice moment of naming history.
Not exactly what you're asking about, but the Cox-Zucker machine is called that because the authors thought it would be funny to write a paper together.
And of course, you can't name something after yourself, so they had to play the long con: you write the paper and wait until someone else cares enough about your paper to cite you and cares enough about what you did to give it a name.
Talk about dedication to a dick joke.
My elliptic curves professor says that she hopes to one day write a paper about badly associative modular forms just so she can refer to them as ‘bad-ass mo.fo’s’.
Reuleaux curves are shapes designed for rolling. It sounds like they're named for what they are (Fr., rouleaux = things that roll), but they're named for the German engineer Franz Reuleaux.
The Schwinger oscillator model for angular momentum in quantum mechanics is named after J. Schwinger, and "Schwinger" means oscillator in German.
I mean, a brief search for the etymology of "swing" suggests that it is one of the truly Germanic words in English. They are cognates because they have a common history.
Admittedly, language evolution isn't really my strong suit so that brief search may have turned up bad information, but Merriam-Webster is usually ok for this sort of thing.
From etymoline:
swing (v.)
Old English swingan "beat, strike; scourge, flog; to rush, fling oneself" (strong verb, past tense swang, past participle swungen), from Proto-Germanic *swengwanan (source also of Old Saxon, Old High German swingan, Old Frisian swinga, German schwingen "to swing, swingle, oscillate"), which is of uncertain origin and might be Germanic only.
The meaning "move freely back and forth" is first recorded 1540s. Transitive sense "cause to oscillate" is from 1550s. Sense of "bring about, make happen" is from 1934. Sense of "engage in promiscuous sex" is from 1964; earlier, more generally, "enjoy oneself unconventionally" (1957). Related: Swung; swinging. Swing-voter "independent who often determines the outcome of an election" is from 1966.
Oooh, I usually just check MW or the google definition when curious about etymology, but an actual website for the purpose is way better. Nice link.
Not quite the same, but in this direction: Abelian varieties are an algebro-geometric analogue of cummutative compact Lie Groups. They are called Abelian because they were studied by Abel, not because they happen to be commutative.
Abelian groups are also called abelian because they were studied by Abel, not because they happen to be commutative. If that were the case, they'd probably be called commutative groups.
Oh, that's weird. Seeing "abelian" capitalized and having that not be a mistake is blowing my mind.
I thought it was because there were a billion of them. Seriously, when I first learned of these things, I thought my prof was saying the number, not a name.
[Noether's Theorem] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem) allows physicists to describe symmetries of relativistic frames, i.e., no ether
This is the first one that I didn't know was named after a person. WTF.
Does that mean you pronounced it "No Ether"? It's pronounced halfway between "neuter" and "netter".
EDIT: had a weird description of the pronunciation before:
It's pronounced something like "new-ter", assuming when you say "new" it rhymes with "through" rather than sounding like "knew".
I think people commonly use a long u like in mu to pronounce knew and pronounce new to rhyme with moo. I didn't notice I myself do it until just now
No, I don't! I know what I meant but can't understand why I phrased like that. I'll edit the comment, thanks.
Btw in german oe is the same as the umlaut ö and that’s why it’s pronounced like it is (also ae=ä, ue=ü).
It's more like "NUR-tah" but without the R. "NEH-ter" is also pretty close
The annoying thing is that if you pronounce her name correctly, people often don’t know who you’re talking about.
I say "neeter" in my head as an American English speaker.
I don't say it out loud because I've never needed to
I don’t think you get the point of this thread
I do not ether. What's the poynt of this thread, exactly?
When starting to study Categroy Theory, where everything looks trivial but "you need a lemma" to prove it, fairly quickly one encounters Yoneda Lemma.
But... this is a Wikipedia link? Is this what low key scholastic trolling looks like?
Yoneda lemma
In mathematics, specifically in category theory, the Yoneda lemma is an abstract result on functors of the type morphisms into a fixed object. It is a vast generalisation of Cayley's theorem from group theory (viewing a group as a particular kind of category with just one object and only isomorphisms). It allows the embedding of any category into a category of functors (contravariant set-valued functors) defined on that category. It also clarifies how the embedded category, of representable functors and their natural transformations, relates to the other objects in the larger functor category.
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The Student's t-Distribution. For ages I thought that it was named as such as a cheeky way to reference that small sample sizes would often be seen when statistics students try to perform local surveys and statistical tests.
Instead, the creator just chose to call himself Student.
Student's t-distribution
In probability and statistics, Student's t-distribution (or simply the t-distribution) is any member of a family of continuous probability distributions that arises when estimating the mean of a normally distributed population in situations where the sample size is small and population standard deviation is unknown. It was developed by William Sealy Gosset under the pseudonym Student.
The t-distribution plays a role in a number of widely used statistical analyses, including Student's t-test for assessing the statistical significance of the difference between two sample means, the construction of confidence intervals for the difference between two population means, and in linear regression analysis. The Student's t-distribution also arises in the Bayesian analysis of data from a normal family.
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I was so disappointed that I would never learn the Teacher's t-Distribution.
He didnt "just decide". He was working for a company (guiness iirc) and couldnt publish under his name
Penney's game, a game about flipping coins, was named after its inventor Walter Penney.
(This is the game where, e.g., one player is looking for the sequence HHH and the other is looking for the sequence THH, and they flip a coin, to generate one long sequence of coinflips, until one of their sequences shows up.)
The Alpher–Bethe–Gamow or 𝛼𝛽𝛾-paper in physics. Not quite conincidental, since Bethe was added (without his knowledge) as author to create the humorous name.
In Hausdorff spaces any two distinct points can be "housed off" from each other.
...whereas an "indiscreet space" gives its points so little privacy that they become topologically indistinguishable.
so little privacy that they become topologically indistinguishable.
Sounds like my marriage
The southernmost bridge out of New York City is called the Outerbridge Crossing. It is named after Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge.
Outerbridge Crossing
The Outerbridge Crossing, also known as the Outerbridge, is a cantilever bridge that spans the Arthur Kill between Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and Staten Island, New York. It carries NY 440 and NJ 440, the two roads connecting at the state border near the bridge's center. The Outerbridge Crossing is one of three vehicular bridges connecting New Jersey with Staten Island, and like the others, is maintained and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge
Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge (March 8, 1860 – November 10, 1932) was a businessman and promoter of patent fiberboard, and the first chairman of the interstate agency known then as the Port of New York Authority. The Outerbridge Crossing, a Port Authority bridge, was named for him.
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Robert McEliece is dead. He was best known for his work on algebraic error-correcting codes, in particular convolutional codes, which were used in deep-space communication (Voyager, Galileo). Furthermore, he also developed the McEliece cryptosystem which is a candidate for post-quantum cryptography.
caltech.edu/about/... "Maryna Viazovska ... and her co-authors have proved something even more remarkable: The configurations that solve the sphere-packing problem in [8d and 24d space] ... also solve an infinite number of other problems about the best arrangement for points that are trying to avoid each other."
quantamagazine.org/univer... 
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