Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other
This is one of those articles that might sound convincing to non-mathematicians (because it is annoying to learn names for difficult concepts, and many people can relate to that experience), but will not sound all that convincing to domain experts.<p>It&#x27;d be hard to deny that descriptive terms are easier to memorize. Sometimes a piece of natural and&#x2F;or physical intuition allows such terminology to arise.<p>Scientist and mathematicians do tend to think about terminology quite frequently: communicating with other scientist and mathematicians is a major part of doing science, and &quot;the reviewers couldn&#x27;t follow your argument&quot; is a valid, and not especially rare reason for rejected articles in mathematics. Given the amount of thought put into it, &quot;intuitive&quot; names do tend to come about when possible (as it happened with what we now call the Ham Sandwich theorem, the concept of Fibration, the Squeeze Lemma, and countless others).<p>Given that mathematicians do put thought into terminology, there&#x27;s often a good reason for not having more intuitive names: maybe no good common-sense intuition was available (e.g. Chu constructions are too general for this sort of thing), or the thing comes up only in highly specialized contexts where it&#x27;s not worth bothering with it (e.g. Girard&#x27;s paradox), or there are too many different metaphors that one would have to invoke to describe the situation appropriately, so that it&#x27;s more efficient to derive a completely new term from an associated name (e.g. Abelian became such an adjective, which now has its own associations).<p>It&#x27;s telling that the author criticizes terms like &quot;Calabi-Yau manifold&quot;, but doesn&#x27;t suggest any alternative: coming up with an insightful name that communicates the key properties of such an object, and is easier to use and remember than &quot;Calabi-Yau&quot; is, let&#x27;s just say, very very hard.<p>The same phenomenon is not limited to mathematics. Would Dijkstra&#x27;s algorithm, the Haber–Bosch process or the Otto cycle be easier to learn and remember if they had snappy, insightful names? Probably. But the same concerns apply. It&#x27;s hard to come up with genuinely better, more descriptive names for these processes. And even if we were successful in popularizing newer, better names, we would find that the names were not the real bottlenecks that made computer science, chemistry or mechanical engineering difficult to master.