Number & MeasureGreek → English
Symplectic
/sɪmˈplɛktɪk/adjective
Describing the geometry of phase space, built on a structure that pairs positions with momenta.
The Greek roots
σύν
sýn
with, together
πλέκειν
plékein
to plait, weave
Literally: “woven together”
The story of the word
Hermann Weyl renamed the complex group in 1939 because the word complex had become hopelessly overloaded in mathematics. Latin complexus means braided together, so he translated it back into Greek: σύν with the root of πλέκειν, to plait. The rechristening was pure vocabulary hygiene, and the adjective now names the geometry that classical mechanics runs on.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → mathematical coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1939
Same family
complexplaitsymbiosissynthesis
In a sentence
Hamiltonian flow preserves the symplectic form, which is a fancy way of saying phase-space volume does not shrink.
The course spends a term on symplectic manifolds before touching quantisation.