A search for "lindelof" and a search for "lindelöf" produce different results. In some sense the results are correct, since the first search finds only those posts that mention "lindelof" and the second one only those that mention "lindelöf".

This seems like unfortunate behavior, since many people misspell "lindelöf" as "lindelof". Someone searching for a particular question about lindelöf spaces may not realize that they need to try two separate searches to see all possible results.

It would be nice if the search produced both sets of results for each query.

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There is little that can be done about the difference between "l'Hospital" and "l'Hôpital", but one might hope that searches for "l'Hopital" would find mentions of "l'Hôpital", and vice-versa. At present it does not. – MJD Mar 6 at 22:07
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meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/133336 (I upvoted this meta.SO request) – user53153 Mar 6 at 22:51
Google search does not come to our aid on this occasion. Searching for hopital (with the site: parameter as usual) matches on both hopital and hôpital, while searching for hôpital matches only on hôpital. – Peter Phipps Mar 7 at 0:12
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Even more important is Godel and Goedel and Gödel. – Asaf Karagila Mar 7 at 1:04
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In many languages, ö is not an "accented o", but a completely separate letter. Swedish is one such language, and Lindelöf was a Swedish speaking Finn. We who have "strange letters" in our names, myself included, really prefer to have them correctly spelled. – mrf Mar 7 at 7:40
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@mrf I understand that, but the situation we are in is that we have many articles that mention "lindelöf" and many that misspell it as "lindelof". I am not up to the task of correcting all the misspellings, although I try to correct the ones I see. (1 2) If you have a plan for ensuring that Lindelöf's name is always correctly spelled, I would be delighted to hear it. Until then, I think we must be practical about the situation we have. – MJD Mar 7 at 7:44
Yes, but is this really different from other common misspellings? Searching for "funtion" gives 81 hits (more than the "Lindelof" query). Should these also show up when searching for "function"? – mrf Mar 7 at 7:51
I agree that might also be helpful. But from a purely technical standpoint it seems significantly harder, and perhaps of less benefit. – MJD Mar 7 at 7:56
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Oh dear, there is a risk that I will go on an edit spree to ensure that the name of a compatriot is spelled correctly. Please tap my shoulder, if I go overboard! – Jyrki Lahtonen Mar 7 at 12:45
And "Lindeloef" yields still a different set of results. In one reasonable sense "Lindeloef" is the same as "Lindelöf" but "Lindelof" is different. – Michael Hardy Aug 8 at 2:07
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@MJD Its not much harder. Ignore accents and case then look at everything with a Hamming Distance of 0 or 1 (or possibly 2, but that may be pushing it). It would take a freshman CS Student less than a day to complete such a project. Testing would need to be done to see if these tweeks would be an improvement. – Jacob Mayle Aug 8 at 6:34
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@MichaelHardy If Lindelöf had been German, Lindeloef would have been an acceptable, but not preferred spelling. However, he was not, and "oe" is not an accepted variant spelling of "ö" in Swedish. There are many other languagues as well with essential diacritical marks. In the age of Unicode, there is no excuse to misspell people's names. – mrf Aug 8 at 8:35
@mrf, what's Unicode? – Gerry Myerson Aug 8 at 13:04
@Jacob, if you look at everything with Hamming distance 0 or 1, you'll find Weyl when you're searching for Weil, won't you? Yang and Lang? Gilbert and Hilbert? – Gerry Myerson Aug 8 at 13:08
Our version of MathJax doesn't do what standard LaTeX normally does: \text{G\"odel} yields $\text{G\"odel}$ and \text{G{\"o}del yields $\text{G{\"o}del}$. – Michael Hardy Aug 8 at 17:23
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1 Answer

This does not address the question at all, but perhaps we could make a list of names which are frequently mis-spelled (or have variant spellings/Romanisations).

Please add more to this post, but try to keep the list in "alphabetical" order and include a link to a math.SE search for each variant. Perhaps put in bold the correct/preferred spelling, if any. Also, undeniably incorrect "variants" should perhaps be striked.

Disagreements about preferred spellings should be handled in the comments below and not edit wars.


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Some of these are definitely not stricly misspellings. With Russian names and names from other languages with non-Roman alphabets, there is often no single 'correct' way to write them in Roman letters. Also, at least for German names, if one does not have German characters available (e.g. in website addresses), then it is acceptable to write a vowel followed by an e to represent the vowel with umlaut, and ss for ß. – Tara B Mar 7 at 16:19
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@TaraB True. As Arthur writes: "(or have variant spellings/Romanisations)". Maybe the spellings that are actually wrong could be set in italic. // I briefly considered adding Чебышёв, Лузин, Суслин, Тихонов to the list... – user53153 Mar 7 at 16:22
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@RahulNarain I guess the reasonable criterion is whether those spellings actually exist on Math.SE. (The inclusion of search links supports this). E.g., I did not include Tchebycheff, which is a common French spelling, but does not show up here. – user53153 Mar 7 at 17:07
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@Tara: While several of the variants in the post are not errors (and I admitted as much, as pointed out by 5pm), I feel that it would be beneficial to adhere to some preferred variant of each name. While not everyone will have easy access to the necessary characters at all times, there will always be someone available to put names into their preferred forms via edits. – Arthur Fischer Mar 8 at 20:01
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Could we mark those variant spellings which are acceptable with italics or cross out the real mistakes with <s>...</s>? For example, it is unclear to me why Gauß and Gauss are currently marked as equally acceptable, while the list suggests that l'Hôpital should be preferred over l'Hospital, Leibniz over Leibnitz, Mac Lane over MacLane for whatever reasons. – Martin Mar 10 at 15:54
MacLane is correct in some contexts; for example, "Eilenberg–MacLane space". (The name change came later.) – Zhen Lin Mar 10 at 21:12
I have taken @Martin's suggestion and striked some of the variants that (I am fairly certain) are just plain incorrect. I do not claim to have an specialised knowledge about this, so I'll leave it to others to strike variants they know are wrong. (And also to correct any incorrect strikes I may have made.) – Arthur Fischer Mar 10 at 21:24
@ZhenLin: Perhaps you could add a note about this for the Mac Lane entry, including any other contexts in which "MacLane" is conventionally used. – Arthur Fischer Mar 10 at 21:52
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@Rahul: Not Lindeloef, unless someone can demonstrate that a Finn with a Swedish surname would have used this spelling convention. The German ö is an o with a diacritic; the Swedish ö is a distinct letter, with its own place in the alphabet. – Brian M. Scott Mar 11 at 1:57
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I notice that you’ve not struck any of the just-drop-the-diacritics spellings; is that on grounds of practicality? Because while Erdös is certainly wrong $-$ the vowel is long $-$ it isn’t as wrong as Erdos. – Brian M. Scott Mar 11 at 2:02
@Brian: When I did this I was perhaps thinking too much as a North American having the US keyboard layout in front of him. In this case as it takes extra effort to input any character with a "decoration," I would expect that the correct character with the correct "decoration" be inputted. I did not strike any "just-drop-the-diacritics" spellings because I do not feel I am qualified to make such a judgement. – Arthur Fischer Mar 11 at 10:35
Some more for the list: Weierstraß; Weierstrass / Graßmann; Grassmann / Prüfer; Prufer / König; Konig – azimut Mar 27 at 22:05
I'm tempted to add both "Lorentz; <s>Lorenz</s>" and "Lorenz; <s>Lorentz</s>"... – Henning Makholm Apr 2 at 21:34
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@ArthurFischer: There are lots of keyboard layouts that provide an easy way to put two dots over a vowel, but no way (short of entering numeric codepoints) to enter an o-with-two-acutes. – Henning Makholm Apr 2 at 21:37
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Any German ö could legitimately be changed to oe, but not to o (ditto ü and ä), so you could strike out those spellings. (I shan't myself, as I don't know off hand which names are German.) – TRiG Aug 7 at 13:38
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