Sunday, November 20, 2005

Upcoming math conference: the name game

I was looking through the speaker list of next January's Joint Mathematics Meeting to see (primarily) who I know among the attendees (because they'll help provide the fun parts of the conference) and (secondarily) speakers with familiar names who might be giving interesting talks.

However, sometimes a name stands out as really long or just bloody difficult to pronounce. In particular, I found the following name: "Hallgrimsdottir, Ingileif Bryndis". (I'm guessing this is a male based on the 'leif' part, but I don't know if that's how Nordic names work.) Sounds like the name of a half-orc barbarian (of the viking variety), doesn't? Actually, in a recent Salvatore book, a frost giantess had a last name with the suffix dottir and orcs played a big part in the book, too, so that's probably the main recent my mind is going in that direction. Anyway, this is one doozy of a name.

3 comments:

Linda said...

On the ISyE website at Ga Tech, there are sound files with the profs pronouncing their names on their personal websites. Perhaps you can find a sound file where this Hallgrimsdottir says his name.

Anonymous said...

Almost certainly female, actually. My understanding is that Nordic names follow a convention similar to the Russian one we discussed, except ending in -dottir and -son rather than -ova and -ov.

Linda said...

Sorry, I have no understanding of Nordic names. Thanks for clarifying.