Can you name these people by famous initials? Challenge yourself with our list of abbreviated names now.

Okay, so today I decided to mess around with something I called “famous initials”. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, just a little exercise I set for myself to keep the gears turning, you know?

Getting Started

First thing, I grabbed my laptop and opened up my usual text editor. The idea was pretty simple: take a list of famous people’s names and pull out just their initials. Seemed straightforward enough for a quick practice session.

I started by jotting down a few names that popped into my head. Just typed them out like this:

• Albert Einstein
• Isaac Newton
• Marie Curie
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Stephen Hawking

Nothing fancy, just a basic list to work with. I figured I’d put these into a list in my little script later.

Figuring Out the Steps

Alright, names in hand, I thought, “How do I actually get the initials?” My first thought was, okay, each name has a first part and a last part, usually. Sometimes more, like ‘da Vinci’.

So, the plan became:

1. Take a full name string (like “Albert Einstein”).
2. Split it up where the space is. That should give me [“Albert”, “Einstein”].
3. Grab the very first letter of “Albert” (which is ‘A’).
4. Grab the very first letter of “Einstein” (which is ‘E’).
5. Stick ’em together. A. E. Maybe with periods, maybe not. Decided to just go for ‘AE’ first, keep it simple.

Seemed like a solid plan. Time to actually write some code.

Doing the Work

I decided to use Python because it’s pretty quick for this kind of text stuff. I put my list of names into a Python list:

names = ['Albert Einstein', 'Isaac Newton', 'Marie Curie', 'Leonardo da Vinci', 'Stephen Hawking']

Then, I needed to go through each name in the list. A simple loop would do the trick. Inside the loop, I’d do the splitting and grabbing.

My first attempt looked something like this (in my head, then typed out): For each name, use the split() function. That breaks the string into a list of words. So “Albert Einstein” becomes ['Albert', 'Einstein'].

Then, for each word in that new list, I just needed the character at index 0, the first letter. I could build up the initials string piece by piece.

So, inside the loop for each name:

• Split the name: parts = *(' ')
• Create an empty string for the initials: initials = ""
• Loop through the parts: For each part, add part[0] to the initials string.
• Print the result for that name.

Ran it. And yeah, it mostly worked!

Albert Einstein became AE

Isaac Newton became IN

Marie Curie became MC

Leonardo da Vinci became LdV – huh, okay, handles middle/multiple names too. Cool.

Stephen Hawking became SH

Wrapping Up

So yeah, that was the little practice for today. It wasn’t complex, but it was a good way to quickly go through the process: idea, plan, code, test. It felt good to just build something small and see it work right away. Just a simple loop, some string splitting, and accessing characters. Basic stuff, but satisfying.

Didn’t run into many problems, honestly. It went smoother than I thought. Sometimes the simple exercises are the most enjoyable. Gets the job done.