From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/6275 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Paul Taylor Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: potential names Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2010 18:43:29 +0100 (BST) Message-ID: References: Reply-To: Paul Taylor NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1286111570 23112 80.91.229.12 (3 Oct 2010 13:12:50 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 3 Oct 2010 13:12:50 +0000 (UTC) To: Categories list Original-X-From: majordomo@mlist.mta.ca Sun Oct 03 15:12:49 2010 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from smtpx.mta.ca ([138.73.1.138]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1P2OMy-0005bU-Av for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Sun, 03 Oct 2010 15:12:48 +0200 Original-Received: from mlist.mta.ca ([138.73.1.63]:43857) by smtpx.mta.ca with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1P2OLk-0000Y3-D8; Sun, 03 Oct 2010 10:11:32 -0300 Original-Received: from majordomo by mlist.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1P2OLh-0002oU-EX for categories-list@mlist.mta.ca; Sun, 03 Oct 2010 10:11:29 -0300 In-Reply-To: Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:6275 Archived-At: Todd Trimble wrote: > Of the choices offered here, I like "precarious", "unstable", or > "fragile". I just thought of "risky" myself. Good, experienced > mathematicians will know when it's okay to take "risks" (and > will be aware of what the risks are). > > "Unstable" seems like a very sober choice, not too likely to > ruffle feathers. Mathematical terminology should not employ words that are merely value judgements, without relevant content. It doesn't make any difference whether they are offensive or inoffensive value-judgement words. This is not how we should choose scientific terminology. We are already cursed with vast over-use of the words "regular" and "normal" in mathematics. Roughly translated, these mean "the objects that I want to study" - other people may have very good reasons for studying other kinds of objects. ("Stable" and "sober" already have several meanings.) There is a problem here in that there is nothing in the education of a pure mathematician that teaches how to make a professional judgement. I never thought I would find myself defending software engineering (the religion whose creed it is that programs are better if their authors wear suits, draw diagrams and attend committee meetings) but when computer science students are subjected to this at least they learn that, whatever they do, they are making professional judgements. Since pure mathematicians do nothing similar in their training they are easily mis-led by the use of terminology that is based on value judgements. They just think that they are taking dictation from God. Even if there is a very strong argument in favour of a particular value judgement (as there may well be in the case under discussion) we should still not use words that have no other content, simply because we will want to make OTHER value judgements in future. The English language reportedly now contains over a million words. Can you really not find anything in this vast thesaurus (=treasury) that describes the situation more appropriately and precisely? There is less, not more, of an excuse if you speak French, Spanish or another language: English allows almost completely free immigration of words. Let's have a bit of imagination with language, please. Despite the abuse that I received for it here, I am rather pleased with my introduction of the words "prone" and "supine" for the two different orthogonal notions to "vertical" in a fibration. A word was needed to replace "open" for an object whose terminal projection is an open map, since subobjects with this property have a habit of being closed subspaces. The rich English vocabulary offered "overt", which means "explicit". Since I first used this word, it has emerged that this idea is very closely related to recursive enumerability, ie to having an explicit presentation, so this has turned out to be a very good choice of word. On the other hand, I regret introducing "bilimit" and "bifinite" in domain theory. In the case under discussion we need to distinguish between equal and isomorphic objects. In existing terminology, a category in which isomorphic objects are equal is called "skeletal", although I doubt whether this word ever gets another outing after the definition of a category and basic concepts therein has been given for the first time to students. So my suggestion is that you play around with skeletons, bones or even the Grim Reaper for something more suitable. Paul Taylor [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]