[PER] Earliest Known Uses of Mathematical Words

James Joseph Sylvester, who introduced the words matrix, discriminant, invariant, totient, and Jacobian; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who introduced the words variable, constant, function, abscissa, parameter, coordinate and perhaps derivative; René Descartes, who introduced the terms real number and imaginary number; Sir William Rowan Hamilton, who introduced the terms vector, scalar, tensor, associative, and quaternion; and John Wallis, who introduced the terms induction, interpolation, continued fraction, mantissa, and hypergeometric series.

богатый ресурс, многие вещи из разряда "удивительное - рядом". неужели греки не использовали параметр в примерно том же значении, что и мы сейчас? и потребовалось его вводить? или почему, например, в моей голове координаты немедленно связываются с декартом, а вовсе не с лейбницем?

"In the winter of 1975, while he was preparing the manuscript of his first book, Mandelbrot thought about a name for his shapes. Looking into his son's Latin dictionary, he came across the adjective fractus, from the verb frangere, meaning 'to break.' He decided to name his shapes 'fractals.'"

осталось только дождаться, когда у сына появится какой-нибудь древнегреческий словарь... и заглянуть...

Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics

[PER] Umberto Eco :: Three types of memory

"We have three types of memory: The first one is organic, which is the memory made of flesh and blood and the one administrated by our brain. The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind has known two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts. However, this second type is also the electronic memory of today's computers, based upon silicon. We have also known another kind of memory, the vegetal one..." - Umberto Eco, Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books.

интересное эссе. но какая удручающая фетишизация субстрата! как если бы не функция (=потребность) порождала инструмент, а наоборот, инструмент - потребность. не читал человек выготского, не читал...

по пути ещё открывается "real function... of books", которая кроется в их "непереписываемости" [на примере "войны и мира"].