This seems to have been common usage. I never really thought about it as it was just so normal to refer to reciprocal as "inverse" in this context.
In my universe we used inverse in the context of functions and their inverses
Yes but, the other type of inverse that is so fundamental to CS in general, and especially geometry is a matrix inverse, which is again a multiplicative inverse, so it's not too surprising how this usage became assumed in many contexts.
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It was called "inverse square root" as it is just another practical "layer" on top of "inverse" which is just meant to mean multiplicative inverse.
This is the original Blinn 97 BTW. https://web.archive.org/web/20130309073539/http://rufus.hack...
This seems to have been common usage. I never really thought about it as it was just so normal to refer to reciprocal as "inverse" in this context.
Yes but, the other type of inverse that is so fundamental to CS in general, and especially geometry is a matrix inverse, which is again a multiplicative inverse, so it's not too surprising how this usage became assumed in many contexts.