Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Wednesday, February 3, 2021

When will we learn not to name things after people?

Personally, I think that naming things after people is a bad idea. I also don't think we should glorify people by erecting statues of them, as if they were gods.

People are flawed. We all have good points and bad points. We've all done good things and bad things. And an action that I think is good, you might think is bad.

Who gets put on a pedestal, and why? Who gets taken off a pedestal, and why? Who decides?

Rather than arguing about whether to call a certain mathematics conjecture the Weil Conjecture, or the Taniyama-Weil Conjecture, or the Shimura-Taniyama Conjecture, or the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil Conjecture, why not call it the Modularity Conjecture? That's more informative. Or call it the conjecture (or theorem) that every elliptic curve over the rationals is modular. That's an efficient way to give precise and useful information.

If you can, come up with a pithy term that helps to convey what it does. My friends just laugh at me when I suggest that we call the Chinese Remainder Theorem the Leftover Things Theorem, but surely one can come up with a more informative name, rather than quarreling about the origin of the result. For example, "Unique Factorization Theorem" is a more helpful name than the "Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic".

In an online discussion about possible names for some new streets in university housing, an Asian-American professor thought that there should be more streets with Asian names, and gave some suggestions, perhaps the most clever of which was to name a street Wang Wei. Others thought there should be more names of women. Someone noted a lack of streets named after Asian filmmakers and gave a few helpful suggestions, while another added an Asian lesbian. Someone was unhappy that an existing street was named after a man who had worked on uranium enrichment. There was a request for more pop stars. Some people pointed out that no streets in the neighborhood were named after Jews. Another was concerned about the lack of Polish, Czech, Austrian, Hungarian, Italian, and German names. An Armenian-American offered a list of famous Armenians. And another professor suggested the name of one of his relatives.

When someone suggested "Miles", someone else countered with Billie Holiday. The Miles backer argued that Holiday wasn't at the level of "Miles". This led to some pushback. It was then pointed out that Miles Davis's life had some significant problematic aspects, including violence towards women.

At one point, the person who had (half-jokingly) started it all, asked "couldn't we just have numbers?" That seemed quite sensible. Numbers or letters sound fine to me! (I grew up on a street in Queens whose name was a 3-digit number.)

It turned out that city rules had declared both numerical and alphabetical street names to be "unacceptable". In addition, street names were restricted to at most three syllables per word (though the neighborhood already had street names that violated that provision), and six syllables total, and had to be easy to pronounce and spell. Some neighbors pointed out that this produces a demographically narrow result.

In some places the streets are named after trees, flowers, or birds, in helpful alphabetical order. Isn't that lovely? Elm, Oak, and Pine are easy to spell and pronounce.

I never learned anything about Martin van Buren in school, even though my high school was named after him. It was only years later that I learned that he was considered to be one of the worst presidents. It would be fun to have a naming contest, to rename the school after something that isn't a person.

I was glad to see someone call (in a New York Times opinion piece) for her own late grandfather to be stripped of honors, due to his war crimes. She pointed out that a person can do both great things and terrible things during one lifetime, and it's important to "accept that two seemingly contradictory truths can coexist."

If we're going to name buildings and programs after donors (or the donors' favorite people), we could at least make it clear that it's not an endorsement of the donors' ethical values or approval of everything they have done, it's just a self-interested need for funding.

Why not name buildings or streets after higher principles, such as Truth, Beauty, Hope, Love, and Kindness?

For a university, I can imagine streets named Art, Chemistry, Dance, Engineering, History, Mathematics, and Philosophy. (We're treading on some risky turf, with those four-syllable words.) Or a mathematically-themed segment could have Algebra Avenue, Geometry Road, and Topology Path. Though I can well imagine math departments fighting over which areas of mathematics are important enough to be street names, how finely to subdivide the areas of mathematics, and whether more streets should be named after subfields of pure mathematics or applied mathematics.

Perhaps there's little we can fully agree on. But can we agree that naming things after people is problematic?