Re: are fibrations evil?

["Joyal, André" <joyal.andre@uqam.ca>]

Dear David,

I appreciate your view.
I would love to have the dictatorial power to reform 
the mathematical vocabulary.
I dream of kicking out long words like diffeomorphism and homeomorphism.
I guess that if they have persisted in mathematics, it is because
everybody understand them.

It is very difficult to impose a new terminology.
There is a social aspect to the problem.
Even if small group of peoples agree in using
a new terminology, this may have little influence on the larger community.
The new word may become a tag for identifying the members of a group.
It may enclose its user into a sub-culture.

Best,
andré



-------- Message d'origine--------
De: David Yetter [mailto:dyetter@math.ksu.edu]
Date: dim. 19/09/2010 10:57
À: Joyal, André
Cc: John Baez; categories
Objet : Re: categories: Re: are fibrations evil?
 
Dear Andre:

Brevity is the usual reason for introducing new terminology.

And, ultimately there is a need, as mathematics would grind
to a halt if one had to write out a phrase giving the content
of each concept whenever one wanted to talk about it.

One may object to the jocular use of a word with a moral
denotation as the name for a mathematical concept, but four 
characters beats 28 characters (or 31 if one counts spaces).

It certainly seems desirable to have a brief name for either
"invariant under equivalence" or "not invariant under 
equivalence".

Best Thoughts,
David Y.


[For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]