11 ms·
Zenzizenzizenzic
- partycoder 10y agoInteresting. Another interesting thing are archaic trigonometric functions like versine and such. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versine
- leephillips 10y agoAlso reminds me of terms from music such as "hemidemisemiquaver".
- blastrat 10y agowow, thanks! that is an incredibly interesting article, and way to learn trig, I think I would have gained more insights had that been part of my introduction. I'm sort of wondering if that terminolgy sounded more natural then because in "older" English, closer to Germanic roots, it was natural to create new words by pasting together morphemes.
- jfroma 10y agoCorrect me if I am wrong but I don't think this one is that archaic. I remember this one from high school (1999/2000). Is "verseno" (Spanish).
- tamana 10y agoIt's not really archaic as a name, it's just a very rarely used concept. When would you need to refer to versions by name?
- partycoder 10y agoTechnically they still hold true, but most people don't use them or even know about them these days.
- bzbarsky 10y agoIn fairness, versine is "archaic" in the "my parents used this when they were in school, but I didn't need to" sense. It only went out of use when people stopped using trig tables, replacing them with digital calculators. And of course the actual calculation of this function had to be done (up to a factor of 2) all the time during navigation until things like GPS appeared. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haversine_formula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haversine_formula
- mrob 10y agoI first saw this word in the roguelike game "Dungeons of Dredmor". I didn't know it was a real English word until now. In the game it's a a magic power buff, stackable up to three castings, which makes sense given the real meaning. Doesn't raise the stat to the 8th power though, which would be very overpowered.
- taco_emoji 10y ago> real English word Well, for certain values of "real" :)
- mikeash 10y agoInteger?
- lultimouomo 10y agoIt seems rather complex actually.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoYou know what's a (C + Ji)? A complex joke. You know why complex jokes are not funny? Because the joke part is imaginary. (I'll see myself out.)
- deleted 10y ago
- farhaven 10y ago> This term was suggested by Robert Recorde, a 16th-century Welsh writer Well that explains it.
- twic 10y agoThe very same book introduced the equals sign, so it's not complete madness.
- j0e1 10y ago> he wrote that it "doeth represent the square of squares squaredly". Now that's what I'd call a classic definition.
- Reason077 10y agoNeed to remember this one for Scrabble(tm).
- noobermin 10y agoAnd this is what exponents replaced. I think mathematical notation is like vim, it's easy to use but hard to learn. For example, I cannot imagine having to express perturbative series in this notation or any serious physical model with the "wordy" descriptions from history.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoAnd yet James Clark Maxwell expressed EM Theory without vector calculus! I guess they had more time back then, without TV or iPhones to soak up their day.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoYeah but: Maxwell's original was an absolute mess.
- noobermin 10y agoRight. Now what was "deep math" in 1860 is learned by every physics undergrad the world over. I would count vector calculus notation as helpful in that regard in the same way that gamma matrix technology helps graduate students grasp spin-1/2 transition amplitudes. Imagine doing these writing out the explicit matrices!
- andrepd 10y agoScientists today are inventing things 1000x more difficult, and any undergrad understands Maxwell's equations better than he did. That ridiculous quip is moot.
- pavlov 10y agoVim and mathematical notation are efficient for a power user, but I'm not convinced that "easy to use" and "efficient to use" are the same thing.
- kbenson 10y ago
- Zenzizenzizenzi 10y agoAnd this is the story of how I learned that HN usernames are max 15 letters.
- sova 10y agothe nondescribable genius of the universe and its conflexing never ceases to amaze and also tickle my jakowski
- sternenseemann 10y agoVery sad.
- cperciva 10y agoMy username, on the other hand, is what happens when UNIX systems have 8 character limits. (IRIX, 1994; my father was "percival" so I got cperciva as my university systems account, and I've used it ever since.)
- jandrese 10y agoI feel your pain. Mid 90s Unix systems seemed to really start butting heads with this limitation. Before then, there were so few users of the system that it didn't really matter (there was only one Bob), but the explosion of the Internet in the mid 90s meant that lots and lots of people suddenly needed usernames and that limit started to be a real problem.
- stronglikedan 10y agoMy sister's university (1990's) gave out email addresses to students, using the first initial, first three letters of the last name, and a number to designate how many times that combination had been used. Her name is Amanda Nal___. Her email address was <anal1@___.edu>.
- Someone 10y agoAnd it doesn't accept Z(enzi)z\1z\1c , either ("Usernames can only contain letters, digits, dashes and underscores, and should be between 2 and 15 characters long. Please choose another.") I hope I remember this word if I ever have to teach how LZW compression works. It's better than 'banana'.
- jimmytidey 10y agoHow could it not occur to him to use numbers rather than words?
- mwfunk 10y agoProbably because so much of math was derived from couching things in terms of geometry and geometric proofs. For quite a while squares and cubes were fundamental operations (hence the fact that we use names for them to this day), but general reasoning about exponents independently of geometry was more of a gradual development. For example, x^4 would have been thought of as a square of a square, with all the geometric meaning that that entails, moreso than as a convenient way to express x * x * x * x. People wouldn't have cared about x * x * x * x, but they might have been interested in the properties of squared squares, hence the oddball naming schemes. People reasoning about problems involving x^4 would have likely been using verbal proofs involving geometric concepts than using the notation everyone uses today, and in that context x^4 is the square of a square rather than simply being an instance of x^y in which y = 4. Grain of salt though- this isn't my field, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong!
- honkhonkpants 10y agoWhat is the geometric meaning of a squared square?
- ClashTheBunny 10y agoVolume of a hypercube?
- honkhonkpants 10y agoThat's sort of what I figured, that it was necessarily hyperdimensional. But then I don't see why geometers of this era would have been willing to ponder hyperdimensional solids, but aren't willing to admit arbitrary exponents. Path-dependent historical attitude, I guess.
- nathan_f77 10y agoSounds like a bug in a startup name generator
- csours 10y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/WordAvalanches/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WordAvalanches/
- ronreiter 10y agooh my god, you guys are bored as well :)
- nickbauman 10y agoA little bit like this, maybe? http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/f_car_c.htm http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/f_car_c.htm
- monfrere 10y ago> Recorde proposed three mathematical terms by which any power (that is, index or exponent) greater than 1 could be expressed: zenzic, i.e. squared; cubic; and sursolid, i.e. raised to a prime number greater than three, the smallest of which is five. Sursolids were as follows: 5 was the first; 7, the second; 11, the third; 13, the fourth; etc. > Table of powers, symbols and names or descriptions form 0 to 24 by Samuel Jeake, written in 1671 Therefore, a number raised to the power of six would be zenzicubic, a number raised to the power of seven would be the second sursolid, hence bissursolid (not a multiple of two and three), a number raised to the twelfth power would be the "zenzizenzicubic" and a number raised to the power of ten would be the square of the (first) sursolid. The fourteenth power was the square of the second sursolid, and the twenty-second was the square of the third sursolid. A truly awful system.
- jballanc 10y agoI see you've never had to deal with IUPAC systemic naming? For example paracetamol's systemic name is N-(4-hydroxyphenyl)-Acetamide. Cholesterol's is 2,15-dimethyl-14-(1,5-dimethylhexyl)tetracyclo[8.7.0.02,7.011,15]heptadec-7-en-5-ol.
- mcbits 10y agoThat's zenzizenziawful (doubleplusungood in modern notation).
- andrepd 10y agoThat at least has a logical meaning, and you really can't simplify it because the thing it represents is that complicated. Using a complicated system of strange words to represent numbers is incomparably worse.
- jballanc 10y agoMeh...it's more of a relic of a weird transition point when chemists had the tools to discover complete structures but didn't have the tools to communicate them robustly other than "in words". These days most non-trivial chemicals are described using their "common name" (e.g. Cholesterol), and if you need a robust way of communicating structure there's SMILES (e.g. C[C@H](CCCC(C)C)[C@H]1CC[C@@H]2[C@@]1(CC[C@H]3[C@H]2CC=C4[C@@]3(CC[C@@H](C4)O)C)C for Cholesterol). Almost no one will attempt to parse SMILES for non-trivial molecules by hand, but almost every computational package can easily parse them.
- rbobby 10y agoFor a name proposed by Welshman there is a suspicious number of vowels in it.
- Tharkun 10y agoAnd a distinct lack of ll, ng, or dd!
- kixpanganiban 10y agoImagine if we used this today and we must input zenzizenzizenzizenzizenzizenic(x) to the terminal to get a desired power of a number.
- ClashTheBunny 10y agoIs somebody writing a new 4clojure/exercism/job interview coding problem?
- dahart 10y agoIt's so cute! This reminds me a lot of the naming schemes for large numbers, like Enneadekillion and Quinquagintaquadringentilliard. Some of these are still "modern", even if nobody really uses them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers Thankfully, just like numeric exponents make Zenzizenzizenzic obsolete, exponential notation mostly makes large number names obsolete.
- m3andros 10y agoThis is hard to pronounce -- like the Georgian chess grandmaster Roman Dzindzichashvili.
- majewsky 10y agoComing from (East) Germany, I don't find that name to difficult to pronounce. It just takes a few moments to locate the syllable boundaries. :)
- ruricolist 10y agoI'm reminded of Urquhart's "Trissotetras": http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A95751.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A95751.0001.001?rgn=main;vi...
- akerro 10y agoZenzizenzizenzic - of course Welsh writer, who else.
- hashb 10y agoa classic definition
- discordianfish 10y agoGerman here; Never ever heard zenzic. Zen could mean "Zehn" which means ten, where Zic might be an old variant of the suffix -zig which is used to build numbers between 20-99. Vierzig for example means Forty (Vier = four, plus the suffix). Interestingly it's not as simple for other numbers where the base of the word gets butchered a bit like in english. So as it's "Forty", not "Fourty" it's also "Zwanzig" (20) not "Zweizig". All that makes me wonder if it really ever meant 'squared' or was rather a old form to build number >100. If Neunzig is 90, Zenzig sounds like it could be 100.
- gondolgames 10y agoThis reminds me of the song Zungguzungguguzungguzeng by Yellowman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV46OGU7ksE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV46OGU7ksE
- centizen 10y agoWouldn't surprised me if it's ultimately the source of the song's name, just in a different language or dialect.
- heezo 10y agoI was really hoping for a Planet Rock reference.
- zenzi3c 10y agoMy username wins.