Monday, September 23, 2024

I thought I knew what pizza was...

 On Page 75 of 

The Existential Theory of the Reals as a Complexity Class: A Compendium

by Marcus Schaefer, Jean Cardinal, Tillmann Mitzow

(see here for the paper) 

I came across the following definition:


a pizza is a mass distribution (measure) on \( [0,1]^2 \) that can be computed for polygonal subsets using arithmetic circuits.

Okay. Can I add green peppers and mushrooms?

There are many words in English that we use for math terms. How close are their English-meaning and their Math-meaning?

Greedy and Girth are pretty close.

Pizza, not so much. 

Forcing is a bit odd- when we do a forcing argument we are (say) creating a model of set theory where CH fails,  I don't think the model minds that, whereas, the term forcing in English usually means the person being forced does not like being forced.

Dynamic Programming sounds like the programmer is typing really fast.

Divide and Conquer- that matches pretty well.

Games.    There are some math papers about actual games people play. And there are also math papers that inspired Darling to say Math Games are NOT Fun Games!  I blogged about that a few times, mostly notably here.




4 comments:

  1. What about graph?

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  2. AH- good point. Most readers of this blog are so used to a graph being a set of vertices and edges (unordered pairs of vertices) that they may not recall that to most people its a drawn function like suppy vs demand.

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  3. According to Wikipedia, "The word programming referred to the use of the method to find an optimal program, in the sense of a military schedule for training or logistics. This usage is the same as that in the phrases linear programming and mathematical programming, a synonym for mathematical optimization." Of course, the term "programming" changed its primary meaning over the years.

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  4. The term "dynamic programming" was chosen so it wouldn't look like mathematical research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History_of_the_name

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