The first 424 people to sign up at brilliant.org/HAI will get 20% off their premium subscription.

This is Sweden, one of the countries on the friendly northern countries side of the world.

In Sweden, you can't name your baby Metallica, you can't name them Elvis, you can't name them Ikea,

and you definitely can't name them Albin just as long as its spelled like this.

That's because Sweden has some of the strictest laws in the world on which names you can use.

These laws originally came around because Sweden is a monarchy.

They've got a king, and queen, and royal families, as monarchies do,

and they don't want anyone to just waltz into fake nobility by changing their name.

They want the nobles to stay nobles and their ordinaries to stay ordinaries,

so nobody is allowed to use the names of noble families unless they are part of that family.

Slight problem - there are over 28,000 nobles in Sweden.

That's a lot of prohibited names.

Weirdly, these laws are managed by the Swedish Tax Agency.

Whenever a baby is born in Sweden, parents are required to submit a name to them for approval.

Of course in most cases babies just take the last name of their parents, but you can technically change last names,

so in order to prevent anyone from changing their last names to that of a royal,

this agency prevents anyone from naming their child or changing their name to a noble name.

But they also regulate first names.

The naming law states that "First names shall not be approved if they can cause offense, or can be supposed to cause discomfort for the one using it,

or names which for some obvious reason are not suitable as a first name.”

This is why they rejected this spelling of Albin.

The parents submitted this name in protest of the naming laws since they were fined 5000 krona

for not submitting a name by the child's 5th birthday

and after this spelling was rejected, they tried again by submitting the name Albin, this time spelled like this.

This name was rejected again because of a ban on one-letter names.

But Sweden isn't the only place where some names are illegal.

In Denmark, which is, fun fact, the only country in the world whose name starts with "d-e-n" and ends with "mark,"

there's a list of 15,000 male names and 18,000 female names that are approved for use.

In order to name a child something not on this list, parents have to go through a laborious approval process.

Iceland, one of the other countries in the jibber-jabber language area of the world,

is even more restrictive where there are only 1,700 approved male names and 1,800 approved female names.

These Icelandic laws are even more difficult to comply with because Iceland doesn't name people the same way as the rest of the world.

In the traditional Icelandic naming system, there are no real last names.

If someone named Karl Daníelson has a boy named Björn, the son would not take the last name Daníelson

In Iceland, boys' last names are typically their fathers first names plus "son" which, surprisingly, means son,

while girls' last names are correspondingly usually their fathers first names plus "dóttir," which means daughter.

So, that boy named Björn with a father named Karl would be named Björn Karlson.

This can create enormous difficulties especially for Icelandic nationals

who have children abroad and name them with the more traditional last-name system.

Children without proper gendered last names have regularly been denied passports in Iceland

and so, to summarize, in Iceland, Aliaksandr Alexander Aliaksandrson is a legal name but John Smith is not.

But even the US has some restrictions on names.

Of course, Americans seem to take this whole free speech thing pretty seriously,

so you don't need to get names approved,

but there are some technical limitations on which names you can have.

There are no country-wide laws on names, but different states have different restrictions.

Mostly based off of how advanced their computer systems that handle name registration are.

In Alaska, for example, you can have any name you want but in New Hampshire, on the other hand,

names are capped at 100 characters because the state computers can only handle 100 character names.

California, meanwhile, prohibits names spelled with anything but the 26 letters of the English alphabet so Günter and Léa and José are out of luck.

Of course these people aren't just prohibited from existing in California,

but for all government purposes their name will be switched to a version without accents.

Also out of luck would be famous mathematician Mileva Marić

who, I'm sure you all know, married Albert Einstein who published the Theory of Relativity,

which stated that you can't travel faster than the speed of light, among other things, in 1905

then 113 years later it went up as a course on brilliant.org.

Brilliant is the best place to learn things like probability, machine learning, special relativity, and more

because they don't teach you by making you frantically check a bunch of inane rules.

With Brilliant you learn by playing through puzzles that help you build up your intuition,

so you truly come to understand these concepts.

You can take as many of these superbly designed courses as you want with their premium subscription,

which by being one of the first 424 people to click on the link in the description, you can get for 20% off.