Math 696 -- The Spelling Lesson

Part of scholarly writing is to verify the references, give proper credit, and spell the names correctly. There is a supposedly authoritative book on Fourier series, produced a few years ago by a distinguished publishing house, that consistently refers to "Gibb's phenomenon." It is difficult to have confidence in the mathematics of an author who is not careful enough to realize that the scientist's name is Gibbs, so the overshoot in the Fourier series of a jump function is properly "Gibbs's phenomenon."

With such examples in mind, Ralph P. Boas once wrote the following verses, titled "Spelling Lesson."

Weep for the mathematicians
Posterity acclaims:
Although we know their theorems
We cannot spell their names.

Forget the rules you thought you knew--
Henri Lebesgue has got no Q.

Although it almost rhymes with Birkhoff,
Two H's grace the name of Kirchhoff.

The Schwarz of inequality
And lemma too, he has no T.

The "distribution" Schwartz, you see
Is French, and so he has a T.

In Turing's name--no German, he--
An umlaut we should never see.

Hermann Grassmann--please try to
Spell both his names with 2 N's too.

If you should ever have to quote
A Harvard Peirce, be sure to note
He has the E before the I;
And so does Klein. Rules still apply
To Wiener: I precedes the E;
The same for Riemann, as you see.
But Weierstrass, you must agree,
Has it both ways, with EIE.

Fejér, Turán, Cesàro, Fréchet--
Let's make the accents go that way;
Don't lose the squiggly little bits;
They don't mark stress--they're diacrits.

And as for (Radon)-Nikodým,
Restore the accent, that's my dream.

But there is one I leave to you,
Whatever you may choose to do:
Put letters in or leave them out,
Garnish with accents round about,
Finish the name with -eff or -off:
There is no way to spell .

(For a curious tale about the name given in Cyrillic characters at the end of the poem, see Philip J. Davis, The Thread: A Mathematical Yarn, Birkhäuser, 1983; call number PN6162.D376 1983.)