Phonetically accurately named theorems/results

  • Thread starter Thread starter greypilgrim
  • Start date Start date
Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
13 replies · 2K views
greypilgrim
Messages
583
Reaction score
45
Hi,

I stumbled upon this:

The Poynting vector falls into a wonderful class of phonetically accurate theorems/results. Others are the Low energy theorem (named after S.Y. Low) dealing with low-energy photons, and the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole (kind of like a shield).

Any more come to mind?
 
Physics news on Phys.org
:biggrin: Good idea!
 
Last edited:
The l'Hôpital's rule, always there to save the students from being stuck on a limit during exams.
 
WannabeNewton said:
Killing field: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_vector_field (kills symmetry directions).
Nice. I was thinking of that one (but for different reasons, such as I'm dying to read a straightforward and intuitive explanation of what it is). :smile:

fluidistic said:
The l'Hôpital's rule, always there to save the students from being stuck on a limit during exams.
That's my favorite! Stuck on a limit? L'Hôpital the poor sucker!
 
Hausdorff Spaces

Where points can be housed off from one another with open sets.
 
Ah yes, there's a whole lot of them if you search for "nominative determinism".

There's also a paper by Alpher, Bethe and Gamow, sometimes called the http://www.snolab.ca/public/JournalClub/michael1.pdf. Bethe did not contribute, but was added by Gamow just to make it sound right.

Similarly, Knox, Knox, Hoose, Zare published a paper on the Observation of the 0-fs pulse on April 1, 1990. Wayne Knox was the only one actually contributing to the (nonsensical, I guess?) paper.
 
Sometimes you get nominative misleadingisms as well. Before the web, I once spent a lot of time trying to make sense of a paper that used the term "Trench matrix" for something. Eventually it turned out to be a very uninteresting reference to another paper about nothing in particular, published by somebody called Trench. In fact, Trench's paper was so uninteresting that the paper I was originally reading didn't even include the reference to it. :cry:

Actually, the web probably wouldn't have helped. I just googled "trench matrix" and got lots of links about long black coats... :confused:
 
greypilgrim said:
ASimilarly, Knox, Knox, Hoose, Zare published a paper on the Observation of the 0-fs pulse on April 1, 1990. Wayne Knox was the only one actually contributing to the (nonsensical, I guess?) paper.

Makes me think of Cox-Zucker machine.

But we are getting off topic.