How Elements Are Named: Fill & Download for Free

>> How many elements are on the periodic table?There are currently 118 named elements.However, since the periodic table is a pattern for how elements with like electron layouts behave, there is no upper limit. When I was in school the biggest element was 103 (Lawrencium). In the next 20 years we are likely to see the synthesis of elements 119 and 120.

BogobogosortI had previously believed this “honor” probably belonged to the bogobogosort (note the extra “bogo” there—this is not your garden variety bogosort. Nonetheless, as you can probably guess from the name, bogobogosort is based on and fairly similar to the bogosort.To understand bogobogosort, we first have to outline the basic idea of bogosort, which is:randomize the order of the elementscheck of they’re in orderif not, repeat from step 1So, for N elements, there are N! possible arrangements, and checking if the elements are in order is linear, so overall complexity is O(N * N!) (which is sometimes represented as O((N+1)!)—which is technically accurate, but unnecessarily pessimistic, though not by a large factor).The general idea of bogobogosort is similar, but in step 2, it specifies a somewhat more complex method of finding whether the elements are in order. In the vanilla bogosort, you do the obvious: walk though the collection and check whether each item is larger than its predecessor.Bogobogosort is clearly superior, because it uses recursion. To test whether N elements are in order, you first copy the collection, then do a bogobogosort on the first N-1 elements, then check whether element N is greater than element N-1, then check whether this sorted-sub-list is in the same order as the original one.At least according to an analysis by Nathan Collins, this has an overall complexity of [math]O(n!^{n-k})[/math]—dramatically worse than the basic bogosort.For what it’s worth, the inventor did test bogobogosort. Its complexity is high enough that he only ever sorted up to 6 elements. 5 elements sorted in less than a second. Six elements took 450 seconds. He tried to sort 7 elements, but gave up after it ran overnight without finishing.Beating BogobogosortTo provide a proper answer to this question, however, I did a little research, and found something named Worst Sort. The notion of worst sort is similar to that of the bogobogosort: start with a terrible algorithm, then use recursion to make it arbitrarily worse. Worst sort, however, is more of a generalized meta-algorithm though, so it doesn’t specify all the parameters to be used. In particular, it specifies use of a function to determine the recursion depth, but doesn’t specify the exact function to be used. One common suggestion is apparently the Ackerman function (known for extremely fast growth itself).Depending on the function you use, its complexity can be arbitrarily high.My own entryI’ve invented an algorithm that’s a bit difficult to compare to the others. The basic idea is fairly simple:Check whether the elements are in orderIf not, repeat from step 1This may not seem like it’s going any sorting at all, and that’s sort of true. What it’s doing is waiting for cosmic rays to flip bits in the elements of the collection so they happen to come out in order.This adds another element to the equation: its speed depends on how well protected you are from cosmic rays. For example, the higher your altitude, the faster it’s likely to complete.Its complexity also depends on the number of *bits* involved in the out or order condition. For example, sorting two 8-bit bytes may be faster than sorting two 64-bit words.For the moment, however, let’s consider sorting two 64-bit words with the values 0xAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA and 0x5555555555555555. This is a reasonable approximation of a worst case—it requires that every bit in each word be flipped simultaneously for the result to be equal to the original values, but in their proper order. As noted, the exact speed will depend on altitude (and other factors controlling cosmic rays), but a quick computation indicates that at the current level of cosmic radiation on earth at sea level, just getting those two elements in order is unlikely to happen before the heat death of the universe.This is sort of cheating though, since it doesn’t (itself) take any action that contributes toward the elements getting into order.ReferenceDM's Esoteric Programming Languages

We like to use latin and greek names whenever possible because it gives us a smug sense of superiority over the uninitiated. In addition to this each element needs its own unique symbol. “Ir” makes sense for iron, but we already have an element with that symbol - Iridium. What about just using “I” you might say? Well, that’s Iodine. I guess we could change it to “Iro”, but at that point we might as well just write out the entire word “Iron”.Honestly, I agree that a lot of scientific words are unnecessarily complicated with roots in ancient greek and latin. The periodic table doesn’t bother me that much because there are only a handful of symbols that come from latin, and in some cases they help with disambiguation (e.g. Iron vs Iridium).If you’re interested in learning more about how elements are named, and who maintains that we use the latin symbols take a look at the IUPAC website for further reading:IUPAC is naming the four new elements nihonium, moscovium, tennessine, and oganesson - IUPAC | International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry