Harry's entry
Jul. 3rd, 2007 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoyI'm wondering about how theorems get named. Babai refers always to the big theorem we today proved[0], and are next time going to begin applying, as "Gowers's theorem" - but I don't think he means that as a name for it, just that, you know, it's Gowers's theorem. A search on "Gowers's theorem" and "Gowers' theorem" do turn up things talking about a "Gowers' theorem", but while it seems to be the same guy, it doesn't seem to be the same theorem. Of course, the most well-known mathematicians often do get theorem name collisions - see "Euler's Theorem", "Lagrange's Theorem", "Gauss's Lemma"...
Speaking of which, I get the idea that the picking on Alex Zorn is not going to stop anytime soon. Yesterday David Cohen was joking that we should give him a Zorn's Lemma problem every day. Today, Arunas (one of the lecturers), for reasons I don't recall, made an aside about Max Zorn, asking Alex for verification - "Zorn was really an algebraic geometer, and was always annoyed that he was remembered just for that lemma. [pause] Of course, it is a very beautiful lemma."
-Harry
[0]Let G be a finite group, and let X,Y, and Z be subsets of G. If |X||Y||Z|≥|G|³/m(G), where m(G) is the minimum dimension of a nontrivial representation of G over R, then ∃x∈X,y∈Y,z∈Z st xy=z. Equivalently, if X,Y,Z meet the conditions stated above, then XYZ=G.
Speaking of which, I get the idea that the picking on Alex Zorn is not going to stop anytime soon. Yesterday David Cohen was joking that we should give him a Zorn's Lemma problem every day. Today, Arunas (one of the lecturers), for reasons I don't recall, made an aside about Max Zorn, asking Alex for verification - "Zorn was really an algebraic geometer, and was always annoyed that he was remembered just for that lemma. [pause] Of course, it is a very beautiful lemma."
-Harry
[0]Let G be a finite group, and let X,Y, and Z be subsets of G. If |X||Y||Z|≥|G|³/m(G), where m(G) is the minimum dimension of a nontrivial representation of G over R, then ∃x∈X,y∈Y,z∈Z st xy=z. Equivalently, if X,Y,Z meet the conditions stated above, then XYZ=G.
