Simon Willison’s Weblog

Why was the popular Silicon Valley incubator named Y Combinator?

20th October 2013

My answer to Why was the popular Silicon Valley incubator named Y Combinator? on Quora

From this interview with Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/frinte...

“It’s a function that builds recursive functions without them needing to have names. The Y Combinator is one of those things that seems miraculous when you first encounter it. You wouldn’t necessarily have expected such a thing to be possible. We named the company after it partly because we thought it was such a cool concept, and partly as a secret signal to the kind of people we hoped would apply.”