I thought I knew what pizza was...

Computational Complexity 2024-09-24

 On Page 75 of 

The Existential Theory of the Reals as a Complexity Class: A Compendium

by Marcus Schaefer, Jean Cardinal, Tillmann Mitzow

(see here for the paper) 

I came across the following definition:

a pizza is a mass distribution (measure) on \( [0,1]^2 \) that can be computed for polygonal subsets using arithmetic circuits.

Okay. Can I add green peppers and mushrooms?

There are many words in English that we use for math terms. How close are their English-meaning and their Math-meaning?

Greedy and Girth are pretty close.

Pizza, not so much. 

Forcing is a bit odd- when we do a forcing argument we are (say) creating a model of set theory where CH fails,  I don't think the model minds that, whereas, the term forcing in English usually means the person being forced does not like being forced.

Dynamic Programming sounds like the programmer is typing really fast.

Divide and Conquer- that matches pretty well.

Games.    There are some math papers about actual games people play. And there are also math papers that inspired Darling to say Math Games are NOT Fun Games!  I blogged about that a few times, mostly notably here.