Referring to people by surname



I notice that there is a tradition in English of shortening names by omitting given names, which has been formalized in contexts like academia (the theorem of Gauss, the textbook by Young and Geller, citation rules) and law (the firm Baker & McKenzie, the case Roe v. Wade).


Should we really be adopting this practice in contexts where surnames show less varied? For instance, I found that the most common surname is the US (Smith) takes 0.7% of the surnames, while the most common in China (王, Wáng) takes 7.3%.




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