what does 'eka' mean
The prefix “eka-” got to be part of my username via a path that starts with the Sanskrit word “एक“ (”eka”, meaning “one, or “single”), or perhaps even with its reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root “óynos“ (same meaning). It is at once a reference to one of my favorite predictions in the history of science, a nod to my appreciation for higher category theory, and an expression of my transhumanist aspirations.
In 1869, Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev published the first periodic table of the chemical elements, which he claimed to have seen in a dream. He was not the first to arrange the elements in a table, but he was the first to hypothesize the periodicity of various chemical properties, and, on the basis of that hypothesis, to predict the existence of as-yet-unknown elements (implied by gaps in his table). Inspired, perhaps, by the work of Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini, who often used tables to organize grammatical data (this would have been known to him through his friendship with Sanskrit scholar Otto von Böhtlingk), Mendeleev named the predicted “missing elements” after the known elements above them in the periodic table, prefixed with the Sanskrit words for the number of vertical steps involved. For example, the element directly below silicon, now known as germanium, was called “eka-silicon“ before its discovery; two elements below manganese is what we now call rhenium, but was then called “dvi-manganese” (”dvi” means “two”). Mendeleev’s predictions about some of the lighter missing elements (including technetium, the rarest and most unstable light element) turned out to be right; in the case of some of the heavier elements he turned out to be wrong (see the Wikipedia article linked to above for details).
In 1998, mathematician James Dolan introduced the term “eka-stuff” as part of a discussion on sci.physics.research about the category-theoretic hierarchy of “stuff, structure, property”. The intuition here is basically that elements of a set are “stuff”, operations on that set are “structure” (e.g. the structure of a group operation), and equations satisfied by those operations are “properties” (e.g. a group structure might have the property of being abelian). This hierarchy allows you to formalize just how much a “forgetful functor” (a term often used without any specific definition in mind) actually “forgets”. Once you start to generalize this concept to higher categories, you find that (in Dolan’s words) “stuff becomes a genuine open-ended progression:property, structure, stuff, eka-stuff, eka-eka-stuff, …”. Now people tend to call these higher-dimensional generalizations “2-stuff”, “3-stuff”, and so on, but I encountered the term “eka-stuff” in Baez & Shulman’s paper “n-Categories and Cohomology”, back when I was just beginning to learn about categories (and understood very little of that paper). At the time, I was fascinated by the “open-ended progression” of ever-higher dimensions in homotopy theory and the theory of higher categories, and struck by the connection with Mendeleev’s nomenclature; it stuck with me, even though the term is no longer used (as far as I can tell).
So to me, “eka-_” means something like “the thing which logically seems like it should come after _, even if there’s no concrete evidence for it yet”, and “the higher-dimensional or categorified generalization of _, leading to an open-ended progression of ever-higher-dimensional versions of _”. There is a general connotation of “that which transcends _”. Applied to my own name, it seems like an ok thing to call the transhuman entity (or open-ended sequence of entities) I aspire to become, even if I’m not sure exactly what kind of entities they might be, or how to become them, or in what way and whether I will eventually transcend this human fleshbag. In the most deflated sense, it’s an expression of “growth mindset”, and in the most inflated sense it’s an expression of radical transhumanism.
It’s a name that reminds me of what I am, and what I think should come next.