4 ms·
My favourite is the Heaviside function [1], which is named after Oliver Heaviside [2], who just happened to have an appropriate name for a function with one hea
by mkl 6y ago
My favourite is the Heaviside function [1], which is named after Oliver Heaviside [2], who just happened to have an appropriate name for a function with one heavy side!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_step_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_step_function
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
- tgb 6y agoOr Čech cohomology, usually denoted with the check "v" above characters.
- avmich 6y agoIt's a joke between students of quantum mechanics that to get operator from a function according to the principle of least action you have to put "^" above the function name.
- TomMarius 6y ago(Čech means "a Czech person")
- labster 6y agoI thought so, but thanks for doubleczeching.
- perl4ever 6y agoI don't have a clue about the math, but I liked the puns in the preface to Knuth's "Concrete Mathematics": "When [Knuth] taught Concrete Mathematics at Stanford for the first time, he explained the somewhat strange title by saying that it was his attempt to teach a math course that was hard instead of soft. He announced that, contrary to the expectations of some of his colleagues, he was not going to teach the Theory of Aggregates, nor Stone's Embedding Theorem, nor even the Stone-Čech compactification. (Several students from the civil engineering department got up and quietly left the room.)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone%E2%80%93%C4%8Cech_compactification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone%E2%80%93%C4%8Cech_compac...
- radioactivist 6y agoThere is also the Poynting Vector [1] named after John H. Poynting [2] that "points" in the direction that electromagnetic energy is flowing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynting_vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynting_vector [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Poynting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Poynting
- JadeNB 6y agoSadly not quite in the same vein, but the Killing field seems rather vicious until you know it's just named after Wilhelm Killing. (EDIT: Sorry, I didn't notice klyrs mentioned it 2 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23890735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23890735 .)