Talk:Bondi–Metzner–Sachs group

What's the best title for this article?

Although the title is "Bondi–Metzner–Sachs group", it is based on the 1982 work of "Bondi–van der Burg-Metzner–Sachs". Unfortunately, everyone seem to use the abbreviation of BMS group; no one uses the unwieldy but correct BvdBMS abbreviation. For example, Strominger uses the four names and then the three letter abbreviation, i.e., Bondi–van der Burg-Metzner–Sachs (BMS), and uses BMS thereafter.

I think I know how this came about: Sachs in his 1962 paper refers to the work of Bondi–van der Burg-Metzner as the "Generalized Bondi Metzner (GBM) group". Others then added Sachs name to the list, since Sachs was the one to give the first full exposition of the GBM group, drop the G for Generalized and ended up with BMS. Regardless of the history, the question remains as to what is the best title for this article.

I'm inclined to go with the correct names, all four, along with the commonly used but incorrect abbreviation, like Strominger did. Maybe the title can be like this: "Bondi–van der Burg-Metzner–Sachs (BMS) group" with appropriate redirects.

Or we can leave it unchanged, but I think van der Burg deserves some acknowledgement. In the article as it is now, I tried to finesse this by inserting a heading "1962 work of Bondi–van der Burg-Metzner–Sachs".

What do you all think? If we do come to some agreement, how do you edit the title?

CA2MI (talk) 21:12, 28 August 2020 (UTC)