Geeky company names

I started a discussion on Twitter this evening about consulting company names. Here are some of the names.

• Turing Machine Computing: If we can’t do it, it can’t be done.
• Heisenberg Consulting: You can have speed or quality, but not both at the same time.
• Perelman Consulting: Please don’t pay us. We don’t want your money.
• Gödel Systems: Your job is done but we can’t prove it.
• Gödel Consulting: because no one is supplying ALL your needs.
• Lebesgue Consulting: We’ve got your measure.
• Noether Consulting: We find the conserved values of your system.
• Fourier consulting: We transform your world periodically.
• Zorn’s Consulting: Your choice is axiomatic.
• Spherical Computing: Without parallel.
• Markov Chain Consulting: It doesn’t matter how we got here.
• Dirac Consulting: We get right to the point.
• Shannon Consulting: We’ll find a way to deliver your message.
• Neyman & Pearson Consulting: No one is more powerful than us.
• Complex Conjugate Consulting: We make your product real.
• Hadamard Consulting: Real solutions by complex methods.
• Zeno Consulting: We’ll get you arbitrarily close to where you want to be.
• Hilbert Consulting: You think you have a problem?
• Riemann Hypothesis Consulting: When your job is on the line and everything is critical

Here are footnotes explaining the puns above.

• Turing: In computer science, Turing machines define the limits of what is computable.
• Heisenberg: The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says that there is a limit to how well you can know a particle’s momentum and position. The more accurately you know one, the less you know about the other.
• Perelman: Turned down prize money from the Fields Institute and Clay Institute after solving the Poincaré conjecture.
• Gödel: His incompleteness theorem says that number theory contains true theorems that cannot be proved.
• Lebesgue: Founder of measure theory, a rigorous theory of length, area, volume, etc.
• Noether: Established a deep connection between symmetry and conservation laws.
• Fourier: Known for Fourier transforms and Fourier series, expressing functions as sums or integrals of periodic functions.
• Zorn: Known for Zorn’s lemma, equivalent to the axiom of choice.
• Spherical: There are no parallel lines in spherical geometry.
• Markov Chain: The probability distribution for the next move in a Markov chain depends only on the current state and not on previous history.
• Complex Conjugate: A complex number times its conjugate is a real number. See xkcd.
• Dirac: The reference here is to the Dirac delta function. Informally, a point mass. Formally, a distribution.
• Shannon: Founder of communication theory.
• Neyman-Pearson: The Neyman-Pearson lemma concerns most powerful hypothesis tests.
• Hadamard: Said “The shortest path between two truths in the real domain passes through the complex domain.” That is, techniques from complex analysis are often the easiest way to approach problems from real analysis.
• Zeno: Zeno’s paradox says you cannot get anywhere because first you have to get halfway there, then halfway again, etc.
• Hilbert: Created a famous list of 23 research problems in math in 1900.
• Riemann: The Riemann hypothesis says that all the non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function line on the critical line Re(z) = 1/2.