[jcburnham]

It's the name of the protagonist from science fiction novel Diaspora by Greg Egan, which is where the quote at the top of the README is from.

> In the Truth Mines, though, the tags weren't just references; they included complete statements of the particular definitions, axioms, or theorems the objects represented. The Mines were self-contained: every mathematical result that fleshers and their descendants had ever proven was on display in its entirety. The library's exegesis was helpful-but the truths themselves were all here.

Also it's a little homage to both "orphaned technologies" in the history of functional languages, such as the LISP machines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine, and to Haskell's "orphan instances" https://wiki.haskell.org/Orphan_instance.