Mathematical Jargon Failures

A while back I wrote an article about confusing and misleading technical jargon, drawing special attention to botanists’ indefensible misuse of the word “berry” and then to the word “henge”, which archaeologists use to describe a class of Stonehenge-like structures of which Stonehenge itself is not a member. The non-mathematician’s idea of “line”, “ball”, and “cube” is not in any way inconsistent with what the mathematician has in mind … Today I find myself wondering if I gave mathematics too much credit Some mathematical jargon is pretty bad. I tried a web search for bad mathematics terminology and the top hit was this old blog article by my old friend Walt.

Source: blog.plover.com