4 ms·
> Let's not get rid of our ability to honor people in a failed attempt to make the communication more effective. I think we should honor mathematicians less wi
by abnry 6y ago
> Let's not get rid of our ability to honor people in a failed attempt to make the communication more effective.
I think we should honor mathematicians less with eponymous theorems (prestige culture is toxic), but I agree it shouldn't be done at the expense of worse communication.
- chongli 6y agoWhat's so toxic about honouring a long-dead mathematician? The article praises the Ancient Greeks and how they named things after their teachers. That, to me, is far more problematic. The history and the effort that went into developing the theorems of geometry presented by Euclid's Elements are all lost. Now we only know about Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes, and maybe a few others. On the other hand, we know far more about the lives of Fermat, Euler, Gauss, Riemann, and Newton. While we can't owe all of the work of historians to eponymous topics, the use of their names in everyday mathematics helps to keep their memory alive so that new generations of people may be interested in learning about the history of mathematics.
- abnry 6y agoTo me, learning the mathematics is more important than learning the history, although the history is very interesting. As for long-dead mathematicians... theorems are still being named to this day for living people. I think the glory we attach to discoverer of the mathematics diminishes the glory of the mathematics.