Why Mathematicians Should Stop Naming Things After Each Other - Issue 89: The Dark Side

Any student of modern math must know what it feels like to drown in a well of telescoping terminology. For a high-profile example, let's take the Calabi-Yau manifold, made famous by string theory. A Calabi-Yau manifold is a compact, complex Kähler manifold with a trivial first Chern class. A Kähler manifold is a Hermitian manifold for which the Hermitian form is closed. When everything is named for its discoverer, it can be impossible even to track the outline of a debate without months of rote memorization.