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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
rg9119@mathstodon.xyz ("Ron Garcia") wrote:
In case you too ever wondered why networks of nodes and edges are called "graphs":
[![Text From "The pioneering contributions of cayley and sylvester to the mathematical description of chemical structure" "Of the 342 papers written by Sylvester during his lifetime, only two relate directly to chemistry. Yet, these two papers, both of which appeared in 1878, have proved to be of great importance in the evolution of mathematical chemistry. The first was a short note [20] published in Nature under the title “Chemistry and Algebra”, and the second was a massive paper with three long appendices [ 281 which appeared in the inaugural issue of the American Journal of Mathematics. In both these communications, Sylvester’s purpose was to point out the many parallels that exist between chemistry and algebra. He felt that the two disciplines were not nearly as antithetical to each other as many had supposed, and that they could be harmonized by the use of an appropriate mathematical formalism. Sylvester proposed the introduction of a common graphic notation which derived from his earlier work on invariant theory. ... It is interesting to observe that in his papers 20,281 Sylvester made the first use of the terms “chemicograph” and its shorter cousin “graph” in his discussion of structural formulas. These terms clearly derive from the “graphic notation” of the chemists of his time, the expression then commonly used to denote the structural formula. The word graph is thus of chemical origin, a fact not widely appreciated by either chemists or mathematicians today. "]4
