[seqfan] Re: New name needed for a certain type of matrix I discovered.

[Alonso Del Arte]

My two cents: keep calling them "unit-primitive matrices" but be sure to
write the first journal paper about them.

Yesterday, at a research conference at Wayne State University, I learned
about something called "the Smith-Waterman algorithm" which compares DNA
sequences. The topic is way over my head, so I looked to the Internet for
help. Much to my annoyance, the top result was Wikipedia (ugh!). Oh well. I
scrolled all the way to the bottom, and found a paper from the *Journal of
Molecular Biology* about the "identification of common molecular
subsequences" by Temple Smith and Michael Waterman.

Al

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 11:04 AM, Peter Luschny <
peter.luschny at googlemail.com> wrote:

> EJ> I'm sure that mathematics authors don't make a habit of
> EJ> naming objects after themselves.
>
> Yes. However, this is very risky. Look at this list:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_misnamed_theorems
>
> When my children were born I was not ready to run such a risk
> and named them shortly afterwards after myself.
>
> I think it may vary across cultures and I personally would not
> mind you calling your tilings Jeffery tilings. However, I would
> not use this name until I see that experts in this field do so also.
>
> Now these experts have, by Stigler's law, the tendency to honor
> people other than their respective originators. See this discussion:
>
> http://mathoverflow.net/questions/24132/what-are-examples-of-mathematical-concepts-named-after-the-wrong-people-stigler
>
> There are certainly such cases also in the OEIS database. For example
> the numbers A000587 were first studied by R. E. Beard (1950) and Alfréd
> Rényi (1966). On OEIS they are called 'Rao Uppuluri-Carpenter' numbers.
>
> Peter
>
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-- 
Alonso del Arte
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