by Sven Nilsen, 2026
Link to issue about Robinson Filled Avatar Graphs on the Avatar-Graph project
The name “Harry Potter Scar Filled Avatar Graphs” or more commonly known as “Harry Potter Patterns”, is now renamed “Robinson Filled Avatar Graphs”, or “Robinson Patterns”, in honor of Julia Robinson.
Like millions of other people the Harry Potter books have been an important part of my youth. I remember reading them to my younger siblings at bedtime.
The name change is because the “Harry Potter” brand, through political activism of the author, is now moving in a political direction I do not support: Transmisogyny
“Harry Potter Patterns” was a useful working name, but now I think it is better to give them a proper name.
So, I was looking for somebody who better deserves the honor of having a mathematical discovery named after them.
Through my study of history, I have noticed that women are sometimes discredited their work they deserved recognition for, and men are sometimes credited work when there is no evidence they did.
This idea, that there is a systemic bias of crediting and discrediting based on gender, led me to the deeper idea of mathematical language bias, which I call the “Seshatism vs Platonism” duality. I became convinced that Nominalism was not the correct dual of Platonism, but simply a form of Platonism that restricts how you make certain assumptions. Therefore, the new duality to Platonism needed a good name and I used “Seshatism” after the goddess Seshat, an Ancient Egyptian deity. The reason was that when Plato wrote about Thoth, he either did not know about Seshat, or forgot to mention her. According to the principle of Ma’at in Ancient Egyptian mythology, the stories were meant to be told in two versions, one for each gender of female and male, kind of like the shape of a DNA helix protects its information by a dual symmetry. Ma’at was the mother of Seshat, btw. I received good feedback on this choice of name.
Seshatism as a name explains a lot about the concepts that are involved in the dual of Platonism. Many of these dualities are historically significant, but they also sometimes reflect more trivial things, like this:
“All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore: Socrates is mortal.”
The word “men” in several languages can refer to the masculine gender, but also mean people in general. In the first sentence “All men are mortal.”, it is not clear whether one means people in general or not. In the second sentence “Socrates is a man.”, it gets clarified a little, but the emphasis on “man” is somewhat irrelevant for the argument.
The whole point of Logic is to use language in a precise way. However, when using an ambiguous word like “men” instead of “people”, the whole argument becomes a kind of muddy philosophical thought that people do not notice, because they are already biased.
So, I made this joke about it:
“All deities are immortal. Seshat is a goddess. Therefore: Seshat is immortal.”
A such simple example can explain a lot about Seshatism vs Platonism, without needing hours of lectures to convey the same meaning.
Names in mathematics and philosophy are important, in the same way humor is important, to express some idea concisely that otherwise would be very complex.
In my work, I try to compensate for biases, but this has nothing to do with gender in particular. For example, when I named Listing-Möbius shifts, it was to compensate for the bias that Möbius is often associated with the Möbius strip, but Listing could also be given more credit. So, when I did some work in that domain, I gave the discovery a name that tries to correct for this bias. I simply want to give name recognition to people who deserve it.
Julia Robinson worked on Hilbert tenth problem, which is about solutions of Diophantine equations.
The solutions of Diophantine equations, or more precisely, the lack of a general algorithm to determine whether such solutions exist, is very important for our modern understanding of natural numbers.
Since Robinson Patterns are about a model of natural numbers in Outside theory of mathematics, I want to honor Julia Robinson, since her work focuses on a similar domain.
By naming the discovery after Julia Robinson, people get an immediate intuition about what her work was focused on, just by the domain the discovery is about.
Most of the time, people do not have the ability to read a lot about any particular mathematician. Name recognition is something that is largely cultural and intuitive thing, not so much a very detailed technical know-how.
When I study history, I spend a lot of time just learning very basic knowledge about what people did. This is because, my own mental world feels much bigger than what it actually is in reality.
You can try this yourself, to test how big your mental world is. If you test yourself using simple questions, then you are guaranteed to find holes in your knowledge that you did not know were there.
I keep reminding myself that there are people who worked their whole career studying one subject, but the history that is recorded down about that person afterwards, often have big holes in it, just like in my own mental world.
As of today, we do not have any language bridge from Inside theory to Outside theory of mathematics. So, even we know that Robinson Patterns are about natural numbers, just like we know the Peano axioms are about natural numbers, we have no known theorem technique to prove that there is a one-to-one correspondence between these two different perspectives.
Julia Robinson was interested in this domain of mathematics where the structure looks very simple at first sight, but turns out that there is no general algorithm. With other words, we prove some properties that shows that the knowledge we get, from our intuitive understanding, has holes in it.
This idea is much bigger than just working on Hilbert’s tenth problem.
Julia Robinson was not just a mathematician interested in some very technical problem. She was interested in proofs about something philosophically profound. A deep insight, which is not just a dry fact, but something that is presented in a similar way to what an artist does, to reach their audience.
The problems that a mathematician works on, tells us something about who they are, even if we do not get to know them in person.
Julia Robinson had the courage to work on a problem that took 21 years to solve, through the combined effort of multiple mathematicians.
I like the name, because, it might take a very long time before we understand Robinson Patterns. The people who chose to work on this problem, might need a lot of courage and support to achieve it. This is because, Outside theory of mathematics is so new in general, but also, we need people who can see things from new perspectives.
Naming the discovery after Julia Robinson is a reminder of the intellectual giants in the past, who’s shoulders we are standing on today. This is why I like this name.