Subject: [HM] surnames and arithmetization
From: Gordon (gfisher@shentel.net)
Date: Mon Jan 03 2000 - 18:33:25 EST
Julio Gonzalez Cabillon wrote:
>> julio cabillon noticed:
>
> Bernd, I suspect you're assuming that "Gonzalez" is my middle name.
> Please notice that my (full) surname is "Gonzalez Cabillon".
>
> Hispanic 'Familiennamen' have father's surname (first) and mother's
> surname (in second place). This is the custom in Spain and Latin
> America (except Brazil). Thus, the "Gonzalez" part of my name comes
> from my father, whereas "Cabillon" is my mother's contribution. In
> Brazil, for instance, the other way round is the case -- if I were
> Brazilian, my full name would be "Julio Cabillon Gonzalez" (accents
> omitted in all cases). When the father's surname is uncommon (rare)
> it is regarded as unnecessary, and unusual to write our mother's
> surname here, there, and everywhere (time and again). Conversely,
> when the father's surname is very common (e.g. Garcia, Perez,
> Gonzalez, Rodriguez ...), it is convenient and standard to write
> both surnames (e.g. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Federico Garcia Lorca,
> Adolfo Perez Esquivel ...).
>
> In any case, no offense has been taken!
>
Julio, what ever happened to the "de"? My uncle by marriage, of Cuban
origin, used to say that his full name was Eduardo Marino Rebozo de
Sarmiento, although his family adopted just the Rebozo part of the last
name when they migrated to the USA. Also, I have seen people in the USA
use hyphens to indicate that they were using a compound surname. With
this, you become Julio Gonzalez-Cabillon, and everyone will realize that
both parts of the surname are Familiennamen. Is this never done in
Latin America or Spain. My English-type name is Gordon McCrea Fisher.
Would people in Latin America sometimes take it that my father's father's
surname was McCrea, and my mother's father's surname was Fisher?
Actually, my mother's father's surname (and also her surname) was Brown.
And the McCrea in my name comes from a man who was not a direct ancestor
of mine at all, but the husband of a favored aunt of mine, the aunt being
my father's sister (so her maiden name was Fisher), and the McCrea was
only a relative by marriage.
Just to extract a little mathematics from this, we can visualize the data
structure which would underlie a naming pattern which included in a name
like Julio Gonzalez-Cabillon not only your father's father's surname
Gonzalez, but your father's mother's surname (before marriage), and
similarly for your mother's mother's surname (I guess it would be), and
so on, going back, say, 40 generations, of if you prefer, n generations.
At first sight this would seem to be a straightforward tree structure,
but one must take account of the fact that there will be cycles (loops)
due to the fact that one may be descended in more than one way from one
or more pairs of ancestors in one or more generations. Thus it will not
always, and in fact I believe almost never, be the case that one has 2
to the k *distinct* ancestors in one's k-th preceding generation, for
all relevant k>=1 (with yourself as 0-th generation).
As for an application to history of mathematics, one might also apply a
similar kind of analysis to tracing the history of the term
"arithmetisi(e)rung", or to tracing the use of the doubled zero (so to
speak) for a kind of mathematical infinity.
If we were tracing from some present-day mathematician the people who
were creators in a process of the arithmetization of mathematics, and
who used the term "arithmetisi(e)rung" in a relevant sense, we could
conceivably find that both Kronecker and Klein got the term
"arithmetisi(e)rung" from a third party, who meant it something
sufficiently similar to what they meant by it?
In such search, there might arise problems which don't crop up in
genealogy, at least not in the same form. What if K1 and K2 thought
up the term independently, the later of the two without knowledge that
the earlier had already done so? Would it be wholly fair to assert that
the earlier one had "originated" the term?
And then again one might be interested more generally in origins and
descent of ideas of arithmetization, and not just in the use of the
German term "arithmetisi(e)rung" to describe such processes. Nicht wahr?
Gordon Fisher gfisher@shentel.net
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