con·jec·ture | kənˈjekCHər

A while ago I was Googling "Conjecture" to see where my YouTube channel would come up in the results. The first thing anyone sees when Googling it is this:

Seeing that was…fun. I guess I knew the meaning of the word before I created my channel, but I had always interpreted conjecture as more of an educated guess, almost like a hypothesis. 

Later on, @Blackmak5 tweeted this photo at me:

A general conclusion based on facts and results? That’s way better than what Google said. But now I had these two pretty different meaning of conjecture, so I wanted to do some digging and find out what this word really means. 

Let’s start off with the etymological origins.

Here we see that the word “conjecture” comes originally from the combination of the Latin “con” (together) and “jacere” (to throw). So the word’s original verb form, conicere, literally meant “to throw together,” referring specifically to thoughts. The word's noun form, conjetura, represented the product of thrown-together thoughts: a conclusion. 

So the modern word “conjecture" should be what you get when you piece results or thoughts together. That’s how I had interpreted it, and it's the definition @Blackmak5 found in his math textbook. But that sounds very different from the current definition Google provides, "an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information." Somewhere along the line an additional connotation was added to the definition, that the information used to form it is inherently incomplete. That connotation may have been the Old French influence, or simply a result of the way language changes. I don’t know 

But wait, the definition @Blackmak5 found was from a math textbook…so is there a mathematical definition for “conjecture” different from Google’s general definition?


Let's take a look at Wikipedia's definition of mathematical conjecture:

"In mathematics, a conjecture is a conclusion or proposition based on incomplete information, but for which no proof has been found.” That doesn’t really bode well, either. But it goes on to say that conjectures "have shaped much of mathematical history as new areas of mathematics are developed in order to solve them.” 

So while the layman’s definition has "conjecture" as a conclusion formed by throwing together a bunch of incomplete information, mathematics interprets conjecture more like an idea that encourages the development of new science. That is the definition I want to get behind. 

Or, you know, I could just change my channel name to conjecturevlog since that’s my channel twitter and subreddit, and it’d make everything more unique, searchable and consistent. 

We’ll see.