theHigherGeometer on Nostr: I may have discovered another link in the literature between the modern use of the ...

I may have discovered another link in the literature between the modern use of the word 'canonical' to describe certain privileged (iso)morphisms and the old use (that is, for a matrix/bilinear form).

There is a slight element of story-telling to the path from late 19th century usage through to what emerged at the end of the 30s, but then I'm not a professional historian.

But also, I can see from the citation chain, someone says the [data] of "the type just described will be called canonical", and he cites a paper to justify this data, and that paper uses the term "normal form" (it's specifically what we would call 'Smith normal form'). I then have a citation chain to the guy who introduced the term "canonical" to Bourbaki (attested in their drafts and by personal communication) 11 years later.

Now I just have to write the paper...