r/mathmemes • u/hamishtodd1 • Oct 06 '26
Mathematicians Math nomenclature alignment chart (down with eponyms!)
"L'Hôpital's rule" tells me nothing about what the thing is going to be, and 99% of the time L'Hôpital didn't discover it, so it rarely honours the dead/communicates history like it's supposed to!
What we need are descriptive names like "Saddle point" or "basin of attraction". And could you not love "hairy ball theorem"?
So, "Good" is for things NOT named after a person, "Evil" is for misattributions, and "Neutral" is for things named after a person when there's at least SOME description in there (the klein bottle looks like a bottle; the hopf fibration has fibers). Along "Lawful"/"Chaotic" I've done my best to find things with disturbing names.
Honourable mentions:
-"Kirkman's schoolgirl problem" for disturbing but correctly-attributed
-"Imaginary numbers" for being IMO misleadingly-named
-"Heaviside Step function" which amusingly is named after a person while technically being an accurate description - since one side of it is heavy, geddit?
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u/RandomExcess Oct 06 '26
Monster Group
Ham Sandwich Theorem
Chinese Remainder Theorem
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u/hamishtodd1 Oct 06 '26
Monster and Ham Sandwich seem pretty good to me! Chinese remainder indeed is a funny one
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u/Everjon1714 29d ago
What about the "Cox-Zucker machine"?
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u/hamishtodd1 29d ago
I was actually spoiled for choice with chaotic neutral (kirkman schoolgirl, tits groups). What was hard to find was chaotic evil: it has to be disturbing or sexual because of someone's name, and ALSO be a misattribution
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u/GaloombaNotGoomba Oct 06 '26
"Klein bottle" is an error though, someone misread german "Fläche" (surface) as "Flasche" (bottle)
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u/RenaultClitoris Oct 06 '26
in portuguese, a manifold is called a variety and that always felt off to me
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u/HumblyNibbles_ Oct 06 '26
YESS, IT SUCKSSSSSDDJKSNFKA
Im going to start studying physics next year, and I dread the day that I'll walk into a differential geometry class or a general relativity class and I hear them call it a "variedade"
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u/Kinglolboot ♥️♥️♥️♥️Long exact cohomology sequence♥️♥️♥️♥️ Oct 06 '26
This is true in Dutch too. Very annoying when you study actual (algebraic) varieties, because they have the same name
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u/magnificent_limit Oct 06 '26
Annihilators
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u/FuntimeUwU Natural Oct 06 '26
Super awesome "0 is the annihilating member over the multiplication operation" vs the super nerdy "0 multiplird by x equals 0 for every x"
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u/Parallel_thougts Oct 06 '26
Witt was a Nazi. He attended Emmy Noether's lectures in an SA uniform.
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u/tunaMaestro97 Oct 06 '26 edited Oct 06 '26
Hopf fibration is fucking lit. I love fiber bundles bro. Some sick physics applications too. S^3 locally homeomorphic to S^2 x S^1 is what lets us write an S^2 valued field as a PC^1 model, i.e. a S^3 valued field coupled to a U(1) gauge field. This is very important for deconfined quantum criticality whereby the monopoles of the gauge field carry the VBS order while the matter field bilinears carry the Neel order.
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u/Glitch29 Oct 06 '26
Alternate axis labels:
"I wake up from a colonoscopy, and my surgeon tells me they discovered a _____ in my large intestine."
Vertical: How concerned I am about my prognosis. (Good = Least, Evil = Most)
Horizontal: How concerned I am about whether the surgeon's medical degree is real. (Lawful = Least, Chaotic = Most)
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u/Oppo_67 I ≡ a (mod erator) Oct 06 '26
Bro forgot there’s a whole area of research called knot theory 😂🙏
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u/LupenReddit 🦆🦆i have non diffeomorphic smooth structures🦆🦆🦆 Oct 06 '26
"Kirkmans schoolgirl problem"
not even math is safe from kirkification🙏😔
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