Content-Type: text/shitpost

Too many mathematicians have the same name. This is a problem!

For example, I am always mixing up Garrett Birkhoff and George David Birkhoff. But they at least have an excuse for their similar names: George David was Garrett's father, or maybe his son. One or the other, anyway.

I remember discovering with surprise that Aviezri Fraenkel was not the namesake of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. That was Abraham Fraenkel. At least I picked up pretty quickly that Michael Guy was the son of Richard K. Guy. But I once met Andrew Appel and struggled for half an hour to figure out why I had heard of him before, eventually realizing that I had been thinking of his father, Kenneth Appel, who was famous for his proof (with Wolfgang Haken) of the four-color theorem.

In researching this article, I discovered for the first time that noted topologist E.H. Moore, co-inventor of the important net concept and the associated notion of Moore-Smith convergence, is not only not the same person as, but not even related to, noted topologist R.L. Moore.

I am not even going to get into the matter of the dozen or so famous scientists and mathematicians named Bernoulli.

I am happy to admit that most of these are just my own ignorance and carelessness. The Birkhoffs are related. The Bernoullis are related. The names “Moore” and “Fraenkel” are common. My occasional confusion of John Milnor and Robin Milner is inexcusable since they are not even spelled the same way. For a long time I inexplicably conflated professor Scott Weinstein with Dana Scott.

But, Gentle Readers, there is one mistake that I refuse to be responsible for, because the universe has conspired against me. There is a famous graph theorist, the namesake of the Rado graph, Rado's theorem of Ramsey theory, the Erdős-Rado theorem, and other similar matters. As you might expect of a frequent collaborator of Erdős, he is a Hungarian. Obviously, I refer to noted Hungarian mathematician Tibor Radó.

Except no, I don't. Tibor Radó is not known for any of those combinatoric and graph-theoretic results. He is the famous namesake of theorems, but in the wholly unrelated fields of complex analysis and harmonic functions. He never collaborated with Erdős.

The Rado who collaborated with Erdős was noted German mathematician Richard Rado.