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  • Hacker News
  • nb: Robert Recorde also came up with the equals sign as two horizontal parallel lines "=". Yes, that one.

    "bicause noe 2, thynges, can be moare equalle"

    (and helped make + and - signs more popular)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Recorde

    see page 5:

    https://sigapl.org/Articles/Language%20as%20an%20intellectua...

    obligatory mention of Notation as a Tool of Thought

    1979 Turing Award lecture by Ken Iverson

    https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p...

    by tosh
  • Waiting for an AI startup to create a phononym of this, in the same vein as Google did...
  • I assume it's already trademarked as a pharmaceutical name.
  • Someone should make a language where every math formula is a word.

    Then give it to an LLM and let it go nuts

    by gste
  • This isn’t far off from Gödel’s work.
  • > …it survives as a linguistic oddity: zenzizenzizenzic has more Zs than any other word in the OED.

    I am an absolutely garbage scrabble player, but I will be keeping this gem in my back pocket… probably a rare case to play it though haha

  • This is exactly what first came to my mind as well. Pretty funny scenario to imagine
  • With one Z tile and 2 blanks...
  • In addition to the Z's everyone else pointed out, Scrabble boards are 15 tiles across. This is 16 letters. You fool. You utter gumdrop.
  • Scrabble only comes with one Z, so some of those are gonna have be sideways N's.
  • by gre
  • Well no, by the same logic it would be quaverquaverquaverquavic.

    A hemidemisemiquaver, while a little scary for the performer, at least makes immediate perfect sense. Unlike that stupid "sixty-fourth note" rubbish. Music is art, not fractions!

  • Just "zenzi" stacked three times. They really committed to the bit.
  • (zenzi)³

    I mean zenzi-cubic

    by hun3
  • I always wondered what the Spice Girls were singing about in that song.
  • > dating from a time when powers were written out in words rather than as superscript numbers ... he wrote that it "doeth represent the square of squares squaredly".

    This is a great example of why bad naming conventions are a "smell". It strongly implies that the solution does not yet fully understand the problem it's trying to solve.

  • Funny that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenzizenzic

    redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power

    I supposed the 16th power would then be Zenzizenzizenzizenzic and so forth.

    by culi
  • Ah, I see someone has listened to "The Rest is Science" recently. Great podcast with Michael Stevens (VSauce) and Hannah Fry (the mathematician)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t-5lQ2mzuw

  • Actually, its just one of the 170k English words we all totally already knew this morning.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48598586

  • Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry is disguise?
  • I understood that reference.