![]() Table of Contents |
What's in a Name?
A Mahout is a keeper/driver of elephants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahout). Since many of Mahout's algorithms are implemented in MapReduce on Hadoop, we thought it appropriate to come up with a name that was:
1. Related to Hadoop
2. Easily findable on the web since it is a relatively uncommon word in US/Europe circles
Prior to coming to the ASF, those of us working on the project plan voted between Howdah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howdah – the carriage on top of an elephant) and Mahout.
Pronunciation
There are some disagreements about how to pronounce the name. Webster's has it as muh-hout (as in "out" – http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mahout), but the Sanskrit/Hindi origins pronounce it as "muh-hoot". The second pronunciation suggests a nice pun on the Hebrew word מהות meaning "essence or truth".
History
Mahout was started by Isabel Drost, Grant Ingersoll and Karl Wettin. It started as part of the Lucene project (see the original proposal) and went on to become a top level project in April of 2010.
The original goal was to implement all 10 algorithms from Andrew Ng's paper title "Map-Reduce for Machine Learning on Multicore"
MahoutName 