Friday, 12 February 2016

soft question - What are the most overloaded words in mathematics?

Regular. To start off:



The regular representation of a group $G$ over a field $k$ is the action on $k[G]$ given by group multiplication.



A topology is regular if a closed set and a point not in that set can be separated by disjoint open sets.



A point $zeta_0$ on the boundary of a domain in $mathbb C$ is called regular if there exists a subharmonic barrier function $b(z)$ defined within $D$ near $zeta$. This may not be the standard definition but Gamelin's complex Analysis defines it as a subharmonic function $omega(z)$ on ${|z-zeta_0|<delta}cap D$ which is negative everywhere, tends to 0 at $zeta_0$, but $limsup(omega(z))<0$ as $z$ tends to any other boundary point of $D$ within distance $delta$ of $zeta_0$.



I've borrowed/paraphrased the following from the Wikipedia disambiguation page but removed a couple that either are not too relevant to pure math or qualify the "regularity" more. Feel free to put them in too.



Regular cardinal, a cardinal number that is equal to its cofinality



Regular category



Regular element, and regular sequence and regular immersion.



Regular code, an algebraic code with a uniform distribution of distances between codewords



Regular graph, a graph such that all the degrees of the vertices are equal



The regularity lemma, which has nothing to do with regular graphs



Regular polygon, and regular polyhedron



Regular prime: a prime $p$ that does not divide the class number of the $p$th cyclotomic field $mathbb Q[zeta_p]$.



Regular surface in algebraic geometry



Regularity of an elliptic operator



JS Milne's comment: A regular map is a morphism of algebraic varieties.



Regular value of a differentiable map



Regular ring (Note: this definition can be made noncommutative. A right noetherian ring R is said to be right regular if every finitely generated right R-module has finite global dimension. See Lam's Lectures in Modules and Rings, Section 5G.)



(von Neumann) Regular ring



Regular language, a language that can be accepted by a finite state machine.



Absolutely regular is a synonym for $beta$-mixing in stochastic processes.



Regular matroid, a matroid which is representable over every field. In this sense, all graphs are regular (their cycle matroids are regular), which has nothing to do with regular graphs.

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