Mathematical concepts named after mathematicians that have become acceptable to spell in lowercase form (e.g. abelian)?
For something even more common, "boolean" (e.g. "boolean type", "boolean algebra") is increasingly not being capitalized as well. George Boole formalized the manipulation of logical statements, and thus his name crops up frequently in connection to logic.
Like "cartesian", "algorithm" is not only a lowercased but a derivative form of the name of a mathematician (al-Khwarismi).
cartesian. Many things are described as cartesian, after René Descartes. In philosophy things attributed to Descartes tend to keep the capital when described as "Cartesian", but in mathematics, I've seen "cartesian product" lower case a few times.
What's weird is that this isn't more prevalent, given that Descartes is older than Abel by almost 200 years, and I conjecture that cartesian products, cartesian planes and the like come up at least as much as abelian groups... And since the adjectival form of "Descartes" isn't just the name+ending, it's strange how common the capitalised form has remained...
Google books reveals that lowercase "cartesian plane" was used in the following books (for example):
- Algebra Through Practice: Volume 2, Matrices and Vector Spaces, By T. S. Blyth, E. F. Robertson
- Cracking the MCAT with CD-ROM, By James L. Flowers
- Symmetry And Spectroscopy Of Molecules, By K Veera Reddy
Many things have been named gaussian after Carl Friedrick Gauss: gaussian distribution, gaussian integers, etc.
I've seen "jacobian" in lower case in a few books.
For the uninitiated: it refers to either a matrix of partial derivatives, or its determinant. This is named after Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi.
Sources using lowercase "jacobi":
- Claus Bendtsen, Preliminary Experiences with Extrapolation Methods for Parallel Solution of Differential, in Parallel scientific computing, 1994.
- Foundations of Modern Analysis, By J. Dieudonne.