Well ha!

it’s a bit like hot-water heater (why do you need to heat water allready hot?) and Lake Tahoe (Tahoe is Sioux (American Indian) for Lake… So to say Lake Tahoe is to just simply say Lake Lake…

So nothin’ you can really do about it Kim the dictionary never is what defines a word… it is the ‘usage’ of a word that defines it…

So accurate or not some words just will be what they are…

believe me, I have been attending school to get Certified in Auto CAD and I have had the damnedest time trying to convince people that a ‘Raster Image’ is not nessiarily the same thing as a ‘Bit map Image’… but because this has become a convention over in the AutoCAD crowd ... (that is that Raster and BitMap are interchange able terms) one has a really hard time convincing them that they are not… AutoDesk being the God they pay homage too over there and all...........  ha!

Yah I picked up the term N-gon from my Lightwave period

[I][/I][FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Sans-serif,sans-serif][/FONT]

http://icantdrawfeet.com/comics/Mathematics%20Ver.%202.1.2.txt

[quote=kim aldis;5493]http://icantdrawfeet.com/comics/Mathematics%20Ver.%202.1.2.txt

Those are hilarious.

[B]Mathworld[/B]’s definition of a polygon: ‘ A closed plane figure with sides.’

[B]From The Free Dictionary[/B]: ‘a geometrical figure with three or more sides and angles’

[B]Answers.com:[/B] ‘an [I]n[/I]-sided polygon, called an [I]n[/I]-gon, has [I]n[/I] vertices and [I]n[/I] angles. In particular, if [I]n[/I] is 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, or 12, the polygon is called a triangle (3), quadrangle (4) [or quadrilateral, meaning four sides], pentagon (5), hexagon (6), heptagon (7), octagon (8), decagon (10), or dodecagon (12)’

[B]Mathleague.com: [/B]’ A polygon is a closed figure made by joining line segments, where each line segment intersects exactly two others’.

Definitions of N-Gon:

[B]mathleague.com[/B]: ‘A polygon with n sides. For instance, a quadrilateral is a 4-gon’.

[B]wikipedia:[/B] ‘A generalized [I]n[/I]-gon ([I]n[/I] is a natural number greater than one) is an incidence structure ([I]P[/I],[I]L[/I],[I]I[/I]), where [I]P[/I] is the set of points, [I]L[/I] is the set of lines and is the incidence relation, satisfying certain regularity conditions. In order to express them, consider the bipartite [I]incidence graph[/I] with the vertex set [I]P[/I] ∪ [I]L[/I] and the edges connecting the incident pairs of points and lines’

That was pretty much all the mathematical definition of Ngon I could find. The rest referred mostly to Vietnames restaurants. There is very little evidence on the internet of Ngon being used to describe polygons in the way they are here. It seems to be peculiarly a CG thing. Although with the kind of people we see in CG these days I should hardly be surprised.

the dictionary never is what defines a word…

Yes it is. That’s what dictionaries are for. If a few decide to use words incorrectly they’re wrong, not the dictionary. You’re saying that if I decide to start calling a cat an elephant then the cat must then be an elephant. It’s not and it never will be. Furthermore, if I did choose to use the wrong name and warned you that you were being charged upon by a cat, some chaos might result and you might be displeased. This is even more true when you use the wrong definitions in math. In fact if you want to see what shoddy use of definitions in maths can do, check out the polygon count thread on this very site.

Since 3 or 4 hardly qualifies as “many”

read my post; ‘ ‘n’, in mathematics, is used by convention to denote an arbitrary number’ I didn’t say ‘many’.

[quote=kim aldis;5701][B]
[/B]Yes it is. That’s what dictionaries are for. If a few decide to use words incorrectly they’re wrong, not the dictionary.

Not quite. It depends on the remit of the dictionary you’re reading. some are prescriptive, others descriptive. It’s a big issue with much heated debate in linguistics.

[quote=patrick.n;5703] It’s a big issue with much heated debate in linguistics.

but, to haul it back on track, more or less, I thought we were talking maths here. Besides, there’s virtually no dictionary definition of n-gon or polygon I can find that lends weight to the definitions being pushed here.

[quote=kim aldis;5701]read my post; ‘ ‘n’, in mathematics, is used by convention to denote an arbitrary number’ I didn’t say ‘many’.

Agreed, but that wasn’t what I meant.

“Poly-” means “many”, but you could argue that doesn’t apply to 3 or 4.

“Oligo-” means “few”, as in oligosaccharide versus polysaccharide, oligarchy, etc.

[quote=grahamef;5711]
“Poly-” means “many”, but you could argue that doesn’t apply to 3 or 4.

or 5. Or 6. or 10. How many is many?

Kim, I sympathize with you about “n-gon” but I gave up that fight a while ago. It’s not the only example of a term that’s used differently in mathematics and the 3D industry. There’s also:

[LIST]
[*]Point. In 3D apps, this typically refers to control points or vertices. In math, it’s more general, for example a curve or surface is defined as the locus of all points that obey an equation.
[*]Geometry. In 3D apps, this means an object with “points” in the 3D sense. In math, it means a space with certain properties, more precisely, a complete locally homogeneous Riemannian manifold (yeah, I had to look that up).
[/LIST]
When people in the 3D industry use the term “n-gon” among themselves, it’s understood to mean a polygon with five or more sides. These polygons often need to be distinguished from triangles and quads for technical reasons, but there’s no other commonly used term for them. There’s little possibility of misunderstanding here.