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This question is quite unimportant, so feel free to close if you think it is inappropriate.

I've been thinking about how mathematicians come up with names for the ideas/objects they study, and how that differs from the practices of people in other fields.

It seems that almost always we do one of two things: 1) we pick a name that describes some feature of the object (sometimes not very well, e.g. flat modules, sets of second category), or 2) we name it after a person (who may or may not have studied that object).

Very rarely we name something after a place. (This is much more common in other fields.) I can think of only 3 examples:

*Japanese rings

*Polish spaces

*Tropical geometry

Does anyone know of any other examples in mathematics?

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    $\begingroup$ Yet another empty question... $\endgroup$
    – SNd
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 15:01
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    $\begingroup$ blogs.ethz.ch/kowalski/2010/08/19/… $\endgroup$
    – Andrés E. Caicedo
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 16:43
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    $\begingroup$ +1, I think this is at least a little amusing. I must admit, I don't understand why this question has been received poorly (as indicated by the number of votes on SNd's comment, and the number of upvotes on the question itself) when other "empty questions," such as the one about jokes, get over 30 positive votes. What am I missing? $\endgroup$
    – Eric Naslund
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 19:54
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    $\begingroup$ A matter of timing, I suspect. The crowd is just not in the mood. $\endgroup$
    – Tom Goodwillie
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 21:05
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    $\begingroup$ -1. I voted this down because I don't see the value in the question being open (just go to Emmanuel's blog post if you're interested in this). The question is just taking up valuable real estate on the front page as it gets continually bumped by what are generally low quality answers. (and even the OP claims the question is unimportant!) $\endgroup$
    – Peter McNamara
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 5:01

44 Answers 44

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universal example?

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Loops (aka quasigroups with identity):

It was at this point that the terminology of quasigroup theory underwent a historic change. It became apparent that it was necessary to distinguish between two classes of quasigroups: those with and those without an identity element. A new name was needed to designate the system with identity. This occurred around 1942, among people of Albert’s circle in Chicago, who coined the word “loop” after the Chicago Loop. For Chicago locals, the term “Loop” designated the main business area and the elevated train that literally made a loop around this part of the city.

(taken from Historical notes on loop theory, by Hala Orlik Pflugfelder)

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    $\begingroup$ Ah! Now this is a piece of knowledge I've been (not very actively...) looking for years :) $\endgroup$
    – Mariano Suárez-Álvarez
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 15:56
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The French Railroad metric: if $(X,d)$ is a metric space, and $p \in X$, define $d_R(x,y) = 0$ if $x = y$ and $d_R(x,y) = d(x,p) + d(y,p)$ otherwise. Apparently named so because almost every train in France goes trough Paris.

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    $\begingroup$ also called "la distance SNCF" $\endgroup$
    – Abdelmalek Abdesselam
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 15:14
  • $\begingroup$ also called the "Washington DC metric" $\endgroup$
    – Gerald Edgar
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 15:48
  • $\begingroup$ and the "British Rail metric" $\endgroup$
    – Chris Eagle
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 16:35
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    $\begingroup$ Why is this the Washington DC metric? (Washington is not nearly as central in the US as London is in the UK or Paris is in France...) $\endgroup$
    – Michael Lugo
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 22:26
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    $\begingroup$ @Michael Probably because of the layout of the DC Metro--to move between two outer locations (say Shady Grove and Vienna/Fairfax), one often has to travel to the center of the District along the way. $\endgroup$
    – Justin Lanier
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 5:50
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The Hawaiian earring:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_earring

The space H is homeomorphic to the one-point compactification of the union of a countably infinite family of open intervals.

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Königsberg bridge problem

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Topos (sorry!)

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    $\begingroup$ Don't apologize: this is an excellent answer! $\endgroup$
    – Georges Elencwajg
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 7:31
  • $\begingroup$ then also "geometry" $\endgroup$
    – Pietro Majer
    Commented Mar 9, 2020 at 20:59
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Toronto space.

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Manhattan distance

Chinese restaurant process

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    $\begingroup$ Is the Chinese restaurant process named after the place "China", or the place "Chinese restaurant"? $\endgroup$
    – Michael Lugo
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 22:11
  • $\begingroup$ It's named after the custom of table-sharing in Chinese restaurants, which in turn are named after the place. $\endgroup$
    – Michael Hardy
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 3:51
  • $\begingroup$ Yes, interestingly there is also a variation called the 'Indian buffet process' $\endgroup$
    – Or Zuk
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 12:59
  • $\begingroup$ I don't really like Indian food, so I never understood why the Indian buffet process is so-called. $\endgroup$
    – Michael Lugo
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 16:11
  • $\begingroup$ The CRP is named after a particular restaurant in Berkeley. $\endgroup$
    – Ben Wieland
    Commented Jun 8, 2011 at 14:55
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anarboricity of graphs (named in honor of the city of Ann Arbor by Frank Harary, but also having something to do with non-trees (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Anarboricity.html)

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    $\begingroup$ This mixes a Greek prefix with a Latin word, and is therefore an abomination (like "television" and "automobile"). $\endgroup$
    – Michael Hardy
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 3:56
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    $\begingroup$ Yes, the horrors. Children, cover your ears. $\endgroup$
    – Todd Trimble
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 10:27
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    $\begingroup$ I agree with Todd, especially if the children also stay away from the television. $\endgroup$
    – Andreas Blass
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 13:57
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The Chinese remainder theorem.

The Mexican hat wavelet.

Arabic (or Roman) numerals.

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The Erlangen program.

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"The Roman surface (so called because Jakob Steiner was in Rome when he thought of it) is a self-intersecting mapping of the real projective plane into three-dimensional space, with an unusually high degree of symmetry."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_surface

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Italian squares which include Latin squares, Tuscan squares, Roman squares, Florentine squares and Vatican squares as special cases.

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    $\begingroup$ And there is the Syracusan Square which is a special case of Graeco-Latin square ... $\endgroup$
    – ogerard
    Commented Feb 8, 2013 at 20:29
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Nottingham group

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Las Vegas algorithms.

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  • $\begingroup$ Also: Monte Carlo algorithms and Atlantic City algorithms. $\endgroup$
    – Michael Lugo
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 22:10
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(Non-Serious) Well, depending on how far you wish to stretch the term "place"

Midpoint Method

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    $\begingroup$ More non-serious (read: "wrong") answers: Hessian matrix (Stone-)Czech compactification, Wiener process. $\endgroup$
    – Goldstern
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 23:04
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    $\begingroup$ Another non-serious answer: I was born in an Australian town called Singleton; the population of Singleton is larger than $1$, so it is a rather misleading name. $\endgroup$
    – Philip Brooker
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 0:54
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The Scottish Book, named as you know for the Scottish Cafe in Lwow where Banach and his friends would meet and discuss mathematics.

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Aarhus integral, Polish notation, English/French notation (or something like that - it refers to different ways to draw Ferrers diagrams - or was it English/Italian?), Tower of Hanoi, Russian constructivism (Russian school of intuitionism).

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  • $\begingroup$ There's also a "Russian notation" for Ferrers diagrams, although I can't remember what it is. $\endgroup$
    – Michael Lugo
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 4:21
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There is Colmez's "Montréal functor" which is part of the $p$-adic local Langlands business. The story is he introduced it in a lecture in Montréal.

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  • $\begingroup$ Dear Rob, I'm glad you mentioned this; it was the first example that came to my mind! And yes, he introduced it in a fantastic lecture in Montreal. Best wishes, Matt $\endgroup$
    – Emerton
    Commented May 13, 2011 at 3:20
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Two more are:

Egyptian fractions

Canadian Traveler Problem

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Nowhere differentiable: named for Ainsworth, Nebraska, I believe.

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The Woods Hole formula, as that is where there was a race to prove this Riemann-Roch-Lefschetz formula.

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Perhaps a stretch, but in mathematical finance it is traditional to name option styles after places. American and European are the most common, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_style also lists Bermudan, Canary, Asian, Russian, Israeli, and Parisian.

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There's a Four Russians algorithm in computer science. I don't remember what the algorithm did or who the four Russians were, but the description "named after the cardinality and nationality of its inventors" stuck in my mind. I think that description is from the first edition of Principles of Compiler Design (aka the Green Dragon Book) by Aho and Ullman. (Googling finds some descriptions of the algorithm).

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    $\begingroup$ For the sake of completeness, the four Russians were V.L. Arlazarov, E.A. Dinic, M.A. Kronrod and I.A. Faradjev, authors of the paper On economical finding of transitive closure of a graph. Dokl. Akad. Nauk SSSR 194 (1970). $\endgroup$
    – Harun Šiljak
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 20:07
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The Warsaw circle is a motivating example in shape theory.

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The Delian problem.

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Dubrovnik polynomial

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  • $\begingroup$ Care to explain? $\endgroup$
    – darij grinberg
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 15:01
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    $\begingroup$ A knot polynomial defined by Kaufman using skein relations while at a conference in Dubrovnik (or so I understand). $\endgroup$
    – Bruce Westbury
    Commented May 11, 2011 at 16:10
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    $\begingroup$ What if the conference had been in Split? $\endgroup$
    – Tom Goodwillie
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 0:16
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The Cracovian algebra- of matrices with some non-associative multiplication

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracovian

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