👓 Six ‘X-Rated’ Math Terms That Only Sound Dirty | Huffington Post

Read Six 'X-Rated' Math Terms That Only Sound Dirty by Macrina Cooper-White and David Freeman (HuffPost)

Cox-Zucker machine. What sounds like a high-tech device for oral sex is actually an algorithm used in the study of certain curves, including those that arise in cryptography. The story goes that David A. Cox co-authored a paper with fellow mathematician Steven Zucker, just so that the dirty-sounding term would enter the lexicon.

I always thought he was cool before (many of his students didn’t “get” him), but I’m now even more proud to have had Steven Zucker as my first math professor in college.

Steven Zucker explaining the concept of tangent to a surface.