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One curious thing I've noticed after completing my master's degree in maths is that the jargon of maths sometimes lets mathematicians communicate with far fewer
by Smaug123 10y ago
One curious thing I've noticed after completing my master's degree in maths is that the jargon of maths sometimes lets mathematicians communicate with far fewer words than non-mathematicians. Irritatingly, I can't remember any off the top of my head, though I know I've experienced this a few times. Here are some contrived and ineffective examples, where I put context in [square brackets]:
- "To first order, [the intervention turned out badly]"
- "Modulo [this error, everything is going fine]"
- "[The situation is] symmetric on interchanging [me and you]"
- "[They are in] the same class under the equiv. rel. of…"
- bhewes 10y agoSame goes for the field I know well, Poetry.
- Smaug123 10y agoWould you mind giving a couple of examples (even if they're hastily-constructed like mine)?
- bhewes 10y agoTake the word Love which immense ink has been used to describe. When it is used by a Poet he/she tends to have a very specific meaning that other poets understand without need of elaboration. Poetry has been in conversation with itself for a long time that it has developed strong general abstractions. I can see that in Maths as well, but I am an outsider so I could be off.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- zitterbewegung 10y agoI am a poet and I have learned some advanced math. It seems like what you mean by "love" in poetry is more standardized to the subset of people that you have friends with instead of a general term that people can use like the above poster uses modulo.
- bhewes 10y agoOh cool, I don't normally meet math trained poets. Any links to your work? (I am not a poet myself, just highly involved, publishing, editing, etc).
- zitterbewegung 10y agoThis is a book of poetry that I have self published. It is available on Kindle unlimited or you can get a sample to your device. https://www.amazon.com/Within-all-us-Joshua-Herman-ebook/dp/B004HKIIWG/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1471270203&sr=8-4&keywords=within+all+of+us#nav-subnav https://www.amazon.com/Within-all-us-Joshua-Herman-ebook/dp/...
- SatvikBeri 10y agoI think this extends to jargon from scientific fields in general–e.g. "on the margin" from economics, "failure mode" from engineering, "significant" vs "substantial" (statistics), "system 1/system 2" (psychology), etc.
- hacker42 10y agoSee also 100+ Concepts To Add To Your Cognitive Toolkit (including all comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10819355
- Aelinsaar 10y agoSignal v. Noise is also priceless.
- noonespecial 10y agoEvery discipline and even hobbyist/fan-group seems to have their own little “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”s. See.
- yyhhsj0521 10y agoJust curious, what's the difference between significant and substantial?
- bunderbunder 10y agoSignificant, as in "statistically significant", usually that you've got sufficient evidence to conclude that your result is not simply due to random chance. Substantial means that your result is big enough to have any practical import. In other words, is there any substance to the result? For an example of a result that is significant but not substantial, suppose you find after surveying millions of people that members of demographic group X score 1/10 point higher than average on an IQ test. For an example of a result that is substantial but not significant, sales figures are often so variable that it's impossible to determine with confidence whether even a 100% jump in revenues is due to a recent ad campaign or just a random fluke.
- 10y ago
- craftkiller 10y agoThe same is true of programming. I also can't remember specific exchanges off the top of my head but I know I've used "it's a FIFO" and "do a binary search" to refer to non-programming related tasks.
- kmicklas 10y agoLatency throughput tradeoffs is the one I always seem to be trying to explain to non CS people.
- niccl 10y agoMy partner has (she says) treasured my comment to her once that the second derivative of her emotional plane is very low. I meant that she is very stable and doesn't suddenly fly into some weird emotional state. I couldn't think of any other way of putting it.
- batbomb 10y agoThere's a joke in there about third derivatives of displacement (jerk).
- pavel_lishin 10y agoWhat's the term for encountering some relatively unlikely concept multiple times in a short period? I was just looking at the Wikipedia page for the physics-variant of "jerk".
- 10y ago
- tnecniv 10y agoThis phenomenon is just a facet of having a robust, shared vocabulary. Words can be shorthand for complex ideas. Knowing more words allows you to express intricate matters with ease. This fact is why in 1984 the regime is trying to shrink the dictionary and simplify the language.
- cynicaldevil 10y agoThe totalitarian authority in 1984 actually has the exact opposite goal. They wanted to control creativity, self expression, and thinking of new ideas as much as possible, and one of the methods to achieve this goal was to try to reduce the number of words being used in the general vocabulary of the public.
- bdastous 10y agoSimilar to your third example: "Without loss of generality, [ our argument can proceed with the following assumption... ]
- jessriedel 10y agoEquivalence classes aren't just jargon, they really are an important nonobvious concept.