Naming a Company After an Eigenvalue and a Dead Contrarian
I spent too long on the name. You always do.
The eigenvalue is a quantity in mathematics that survives every transformation unchanged. You can rotate it, scale it, apply any pressure the world has — and the eigenvalue stays itself. It doesn't drift. It doesn't negotiate.
Christopher Hitchens believed clarity was a moral obligation. Not cruelty. Clarity. The refusal to let comfortable vagueness stand when a precise sentence was available.
Put them together and you get the operating principle: find the invariant truth, then say it plainly.
I filed the Wyoming LLC on a Tuesday. Wyoming because it matched — the land doesn't lie to you there. The geometry is exposed. You can see the line running true across the basin from twenty miles out.
My friend Dave laughed when I told him the name. "You named your company after math and a dead British guy?" Yeah. I did.