6 Comments

the best present

Expand full comment

Thanks for this whole post and for sharing that "If I don’t have memorable names to associate certain results with, it all blends together in my head"! I've been using Blitzstein & Hwang's probability textbook for teaching, and one of the many things I like about it is that they go out of their way to use (and sometimes invent) memorable names for theorems. :)

Expand full comment

Nice. I think the first time I experienced this was while doing maths olympiad classes as a teenager and citing the pigeonhole principle a lot in combinatorics problems. A verbal description of the same concept would have been very convoluted. Even having names for "obvious" ideas is really useful

Expand full comment

I know what I'll get you next Christmas.

Expand full comment

If you haven't read Helen DeWitt's novel _The Last Samurai_, it may or may not change your view of the Kurosawa but it will probably fascinate you regardless.

Expand full comment

Thanks for the recommendation!

Expand full comment