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#terminology — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #terminology, aggregated by home.social.

  1. A quotation from John Adams

    As I have always been convinced that abuse of Words, has been the great instrument of Sophistry and Chicanery — of party, faction and Division in Society.

    John Adams (1735-1826) American lawyer, Founding Father, statesman, US President (1797-1801)
    Letter (1819-03-31) to J. H. Tiffany

    More info about this quote: wist.info/adams-john/36295/


    #quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #johnadams #equivocation #ambiguity #chicanery #deception #language #meaning #persuasion #rhetoric #sophistry #talking #terminology #wordplay #words #definition

  2. #Edibuddies (for the uninitiated, that means (“#editor #friends”), go follow this conversation over on Bluesky if you love book-design #terminology: bsky.app/profile/dylanmeconis.. It’ll bring you joy. 💖

  3. The name for the algebraic structure consisting of a set \(A\) equipped with a binary operation \(f\colon A^2\to A\) which is not assumed to be commutative, associative, etc. has an interesting history. As far as I can tell, this sort of algebra was originally known as a "groupoid", and you can find recent literature using the term in that way. However, Nicolas Bourbaki called a set with a single binary operation a "magma" in his Éléments de mathématique and this name came to be used when there might be confusion with the newer topological use of "groupoid" to mean a category whose morphisms are all invertible. A third contender is "binar". I don't know the history of this one but it seems reasonable to me.

    I prefer "magma" myself. I don't know what a "lava" or a "volcano" should be nor have I had the audacity to try to name something like this in the literature. One reason I prefer "magma" is that I can talk about a set \(A\) equipped with a single \(n\)-ary operation \(f\colon A^n\to A\) as an "\(n\)-ary magma" (or just "\(n\)-magma" or even "magma").

    #algebra #UniversalAlgebra #topology #bourbaki #terminology