Timeline for Origins of Mathematical Symbols/Names
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 5 at 19:24 | comment | added | Ponce | @KConrad And the collective concept sense of the term kind of circles back (pun intended) to the O shape, since apparently the German "Ring" ("HRing") was first used as a kind of synonym for "Kreis" | |
| May 23 at 22:09 | comment | added | KConrad | @Ponce I have never heard about Hilbert explaining the purpose behind choosing the term to anyone, but the idea that it was chosen with ring in its sense as a collective concept seems more plausible than the other option. | |
| May 23 at 19:43 | comment | added | Ponce | I should add that for me the etymology of ring is the one that have puzzled me the most since I was an undergrad, and I must confess that I forced myself to believe that it was just a "cool" word that was arbitrarily chosen by mathematicians to refer to an important mathematical structure, but that really didn't give any information about those structures. I even felt kind of embarassed to ask my professors about its etymology for fear of being told that the reason for the name was too obvious. I feel now a great relief finding out that is a complex etymology after all! thank you! | |
| May 23 at 19:31 | comment | added | Ponce | @KConrad reading from the multiple comments and links connected to this from your link, I think is safe to say that we don't know why Hilbert chose the word Zahlring to denote the set of algebraic integers? I'm leaning towards the hypothesis that the symbol Dedekind used for his equivalent Ordnungs, does look like a "ring" of sorts, than to the competing hypothesis that refers to how expressions of powers of algebraic integers kind of circle back to a member of the ring. | |
| Aug 13, 2010 at 4:47 | comment | added | KConrad | This is a false etymology. Everyone thinks it's from cycling in modular arithmetic (I once did), but please look at mathoverflow.net/questions/35286/… for the correct history of the term ring. | |
| May 16, 2010 at 8:51 | comment | added | ogerard | Certainly thanks to the chosen word (ring, anneau in french) I have always thought of a ring as a torus, like the product of one operation (+) by the other (x) and closed in these two dimensions. I guess that I would also like to see sub-rings and modules as small rings with the initial ring like a thread passing in their holes. | |
| Dec 13, 2009 at 19:23 | comment | added | REDace0 | I think it mentions on there that "ring" comes from the cyclic structure you get in many rings, e.g. successive powers of the same element in $\mathbb{Z}/k\mathbb{Z}$. | |
| Dec 9, 2009 at 4:37 | comment | added | Mariano Suárez-Álvarez | Yeah, I had seen that. That does not explain why 'ring' was chosen, though. | |
| Dec 9, 2009 at 4:23 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Anton Geraschenko | ||
| Dec 9, 2009 at 3:33 | history | answered | REDace0 | CC BY-SA 2.5 |