this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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Science Memes

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[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Gotta love Dirichlet boundary conditions (the function has to have this value), Neumann boundary conditions (the derivative has to have this value) and Cauchy boundary conditions (both).

On the other hand, there's a bunch of things that are so abstract that it's difficult to give them a descriptive name, like rings, magmas and weasels

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Oh i would say "ring" is in fact quite a descriptive term.

Apparently, in older german, "ringen" meant "to make progress of some sort/to fight for something". And a ring has two functions: addition and multiplication. These are the foundational functions that you can use to construct polynomials, which are very important functions. You could look at functions as a machine where you put something in and get something out.

In other words, you put something into a function, the function internally "makes some progress", and spits out a result. That is exactly what you can do with a "ring".

So it kinda makes sense, I guess.