Wherein I untangle the meaning of my name

24 April 2002

I've decided that I don't like the term mathematician.  There's something
limiting about the concept, seemingly restricted to those with doctoral
credentials, or at least a history of proving theorems and enjoying it.  
More than that, one can imagine a mathematician peering over a separable
Hilbert space, scalpel in hand, slicing and dicing the creature into
submission.

Or at least, I imagine so.

Of course, this opens the matter of what to call the people who play in 
fields, organize groups, and make sets of sets;  I like the term "math 
person".  Martin Gardner, my favorite author on all things mathy (one 
could include Douglas Hofstadter in this, but I think of him as more of a 
philosophy writer, though Gardner writes on philosophy as well), would not 
be called a mathematician by most people, as he doesn't have the 
credentials and his profession is writing, not proving.  Still, Gardner's 
an undeniable math person.

Math people are generally a jolly bunch, often given to mysticism and 
silly word games.  Such people have math concepts insinuating into their 
daily lives, with little d/dv's of saline dripping through their pores,  
vector fields sprouting from their skulls, and point processes being 
transferred from neuron to neuron.  Perhaps that is why so often math 
people tend to use the language of the everyday when defining their 
sharp-edged math entities.  It also makes for some fun mental retorts to 
the signs one sees about town.  This morning, walking up the tunnel from 
the W. 4th subway stop, I spied a poster for an undoubtably bad J-Lo pic, 
titled =Enough=.  The tagline for this soon-to-be-trashed piece of 
celluloid is "Everyone has their limit".  My thought "Well, not true, but 
everyone =does= have their lim sup."

(And don't get on me (or them) about "everyone" being singular and "their" 
being plural.  Don't deny me my pronoun revolution, which is simply a 
return to the way the language used to be before logicians got a hold of 
our mother tongue.  Damn you, you inkhornists!)

So now that I have dubbed myself a math person, I note that the initials 
of that phrase is "m.p." so one can shorten that two-syllable phrase to 
"meep".  Wow, I never knew what my name meant, and now I do.

Meep = math person

I'll never be alone again.