this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
980 points (98.6% liked)

Science Memes

15370 readers
2322 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] InverseParallax@lemmy.world 88 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (16 children)

Yeah, it's an in-group exclusivity signifier.

Shame, math is some of the worst at this, everything is named after some guy, so there's 0 semantic associativity, you either know exactly which Gaussian term they mean, or you are completely clueless even though they just mean noise with a normal distribution.

edit: Currently in a very inter-disciplinary field where the different mathematicians have their own language which has to be translated back into first software, then hardware. It's so confusing at first till you spend 30 minutes on wikipedia to realize they're just using an esoteric term to describe something you've used forever.

[–] MBM 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Gotta love Dirichlet boundary conditions (the function has to have this value), Neumann boundary conditions (the derivative has to have this value) and Cauchy boundary conditions (both).

On the other hand, there's a bunch of things that are so abstract that it's difficult to give them a descriptive name, like rings, magmas and weasels

Oh i would say "ring" is in fact quite a descriptive term.

Apparently, in older german, "ringen" meant "to make progress of some sort/to fight for something". And a ring has two functions: addition and multiplication. These are the foundational functions that you can use to construct polynomials, which are very important functions. You could look at functions as a machine where you put something in and get something out.

In other words, you put something into a function, the function internally "makes some progress", and spits out a result. That is exactly what you can do with a "ring".

So it kinda makes sense, I guess.

load more comments (14 replies)