Category: Language

In supermarkets in Zürich (and in other German-speaking parts of the world), aluminium foil is called “Aluminiumfolie” — fairly straightforward, certainly, but since the word “folie” means “madness” in French, every time I see this word, I can’t help thinking of a some kind of craze for aluminium that would justify a name like “aluminium madness”.

Similarly, the word “Art” in German does not mean what the spelling suggests (which is “die Kunst”); much more mundanely, it means “kind” as in “integral of the third kind” or “Stirling-Zahlen zweiter Art”. But, even more than for aluminium, whenever I read a title like

Über eine neue Art von nichtanalytischen automorphen Funktionen und die Bestimmung Dirichletscher Reihen durch Funktionalgleichungen

I can not help translating it as

A new art of non-holomorphic automorphic functions and the determination of Dirichlet series by functional equations

(this is the paper where Hans Maass first introduced what are now called Maass forms, and showed how these non-holomorphic modular forms could lead to Dirichlet series with functional equation related to real quadratic fields, in analogy with the case of imaginary quadratic fields where holomorphic forms occured — both are now understood as cases of “Langlands functoriality”).

Equally romantic is Emil Artin’s title

Über eine neue Art von L-Reihen

for the paper where he introduces what are now called Artin L-functions; translating it as “On a new art of L-functions” seems so much better than just “On a new kind of L-functions”…

Having just sent the title

Erdös-Kác, Rényi-Turán, Keating-Snaith, and Katz-Sarnak

for a lecture at a forthcoming conference, I was naturally led to wonder about the marvelous English expression name-dropping, and I resorted to the OED for information. I was surprised to see that the word is claimed to go back no further than the 1940’s; in fact the first quotation is for name-dropper:

1939 Los Angeles Times 17 Jan. 115/5 My pet aversion..is the name dropper, the type that is always saying: ‘Well,..when I had lunch with the P. of W., he said-’ I say to them: ‘The P. of What?’ ‘The P. of W., the Prince of Wales, of course,’ they say.

The first instance of name-dropping is in 1945; a nice quotation from 1999 is

1999 Times 16 July 24/7 Name-dropping is so vulgar, as I was telling the Queen last week.

Considering that the phenomenon certainly goes back to the dawns of celebrity (there must have been some name-droppers in philosophical circles in Ancient Greece), it’s a surprise to see it acquire its specific name so recently. And most languages probably don’t even have a good equivalent; I would certainly be hard put to give a good translation of name-dropping in French. Are there other languages better suited to the task?

One of my mathematics teachers, a long time ago, once objected to statements of the type

Let X and Y be two compact topological spaces. Then X x Y is also compact

on the ground that the use of two implied that the statement did not apply to the case of X x X, whose compacity would need to be stated separately, as it was not, strictly speaking, an application of the given statement.

His favored solution was to drop the two (or, in French, to replace Soient X et Y deux espaces… by Soient X et Y des espaces….), with the idea (I presume) that making a grammatical mistake (using a plural form like des when, sometimes, there is only one object, if X=Y) would be less important than a mathematical one.

Strangely enough, I still sometimes remember this, and I have modified various sentences to try to go around it, although the whole thing seems quite absurd really… I wonder if others have heard this type of rules, and if there’s a mathematically and syntaxically correct way to phrase things without being absurdly formal?

A select few of my mathematical books exhibit the type of quirky behavior that (quite justifiably) causes authors to consider publishers as being in league with the devil. In increasing order of amusement, here is one page of the index of my copy of Reed and Simons’s “Functional Analysis” (Modern Methods of Mathematical Physics, Vol. I)

Then here is one page of Goodman and Wallach’s “Representations and invariants of the classical groups”

which almost looks normal, except for (as in the red circle I drew) the ligatures “fi” which are missing. It must have caused much grinding of teeth to the authors to note that this is not the case all over the book: many of the pages contain an abundance of “finite”, “definition”, etc, with no error whatsoever. In particular, opening the book at random, you would never detect the problem.

And finally, my masterpiece, if I may say so: my copy of Katz and Sarnak’s “Random matrices, Frobenius eigenvalues, and monodromy”, where the introduction, from page 5 to page 20, felt that its importance justified that it be repeated after page 228 (up to page 244):

None of these, however, are as extraordinary as the instance reported in the story “The Missing Line” of Isaac Bashevis Singer, where an abstruse philosophical sentence — “the transcendental unity of the apperception” — mystically moves from one Yiddish newspaper to another. (Although it is in a work of fiction, so might be a complete invention, I have the impression that it is so bizarre that it must have actually happened).