[ExI] Mathematical terminology

[Damien Broderick]

At 10:41 AM 6/10/2007 -0400, John Clark wrote:

>When too many people
>start to understand a jargon (like AI) there is a tendency in many to change
>it to something less comprehensible, particularly if your ideas are
>confused, contradictory or just plain silly because then what you say sounds
>deep even when it is not. That's why psychology is so dense with unnecessary
>jargon while mathematics prefers the simplest words they can find, like
>continuous, limit, open, and closed.

Hmm. Surd, brachistochrone, logistic, vinculum, affine, symplectic, 
orthogonal, disjoint, vector, cosecant, isosceles, asymptote, 
logarithm, tesselate, integer, algorithm... (I agree that these might 
be *the simplest terms they can find,* many of them very old and 
therefore built out of Greek, Latin or Arabic roots.)

Damien Broderick