Most memorable titles - MathOverflow [closed]

Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T14:11:28Z

Apparently, for a large number of readers, the choice whether they select to read a paper or not is often strongly influenced by the title.

I was wondering if the MO-users would be willing to share their wisdom with me on what makes the title of a paper memorable for them; or perhaps just cite an example of title they find memorable?

This advice would be very helpful in helping me (and perhaps others) in designing better, more informative titles (not only for papers, but also for example, for MO questions).

One title that I find memorable is:

Nineteen dubious ways to compute the exponential of a matrix by C. B. Moler and C. F. van Loan.

EDIT: The response to this question has been quite huge. So, what have I learned from it? A few things at least. Here is my summary of the obvious stuff: Amongst the various "memorable" titles reported, it seems that the following statements are true:

A title can be memorable, attractive, or even both (to oversimplify a bit);
A title becomes truly memorable if the accompanying paper had memorable substance
A title can be attractive even without having memorable material
To reach the broadest audience, attractive titles are good, though mathematicians might sometimes feel irritated by needlessly cute titles
Titles that are bold, are usually short, have an element of surprise, but do not depart too much from the truth seems to be more attractive in general. 5.101 Mathematical succinctness might appeal to some people---but is perhaps not that memorable for me---so perhaps such titles are attractive, but maybe not memorable
If you are a bigshot, you can get away with pretty much any title!

If something more precise comes to mind, I will edit the above list.

Answer by Andrea Ferretti for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T14:30:31Z

One that comes immediately to mind is Can one hear the shape of a drum?

Answer by J. M. for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T14:46:55Z

The AKS paper Primes is in P is a pretty memorable title for me.

Answer by Thierry Zell for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T14:49:54Z

OK, fine... I'll confess I could not resist downloading from the arxiv the paper Act globally, compute locally: group actions, fixed points, and localization. I don't know if it quite fits the question though, since I never read it (beyond the first couple of pages). It's just way too far outside of my main interests.

Answer by David Speyer for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T15:04:35Z

"Hodge's general conjecture is false for trivial reasons."

Answer by VladAr for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T15:05:32Z

Everybody knows what a Hopf algebra is

Answer by Harry Gindi for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T15:13:02Z

On the Dreaded Right Bousfield Localization by C. Barwick.

Answer by Micah Milinovich for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T15:30:23Z

"Footnote To a Note of Davenport and Heilbronn" by J. W. S. Cassels.

http://jlms.oxfordjournals.org/content/s1-36/1/177.extract

Answer by José Figueroa-O'Farrill for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T15:48:00Z

Atiyah's K-Theory and Reality

Answer by Boris Bukh for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T16:11:56Z

An application of Poincaré's recurrence theorem to academic administration by Kenneth Meyer is a title that is hard to resist looking into.

Answer by Pete L. Clark for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T16:22:48Z

Finding composite order ordinary elliptic curves using the Cocks-Pinch method, by D. Boneh, K. Rubin and A. Silverberg. (To appear in the Journal of Number Theory.)

Answer by Ira Gessel for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T16:27:59Z

Al Capone and the Death Ray by R. C. Lyness

Answer by Byron Schmuland for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T16:34:17Z

Zaphod Beeblebrox's Brain and the Fifty-ninth Row of Pascal's Triangle

Answer by Georges Elencwajg for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T16:35:50Z

The flattering lie You Could Have Invented Spectral Sequences by Timothy Y. Chow.

Answer by Dan Petersen for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T16:38:29Z

I find it dubious that anyone here will get better at choosing titles for their papers by reading these examples.

Nevertheless, I like the title "The homotopy category is a homotopy category" by Arne Strøm. I also like the very apt title "$\overline{\mathcal{M}}_{22}$ is of general type" by Gavril Farkas. The paper starts like this:

The aim of this paper is to prove the following result:

Theorem: The moduli space of curves of genus 22 is of general type.

Answer by Mariano Suárez-Alvarez for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T16:40:10Z

The book _$A=B$_.

Answer by Andres Caicedo for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T16:49:32Z

Marginalia to a theorem of Silver (see also this link) by Keith I. Devlin and R. B. Jensen, 1975. A humble title and yet, undoubtedly, one of the most important papers of all time in set theory.

Answer by Spiro Karigiannis for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T16:56:36Z

I like Cliff Taubes's simple titles: "Gr -> SW", "SW -> Gr", and "SW = Gr". (Okay, they each also have a subtitle, but the first part is enough to tell the reader exactly what the paper is about.)

Answer by robot for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T17:01:01Z

Homotopy Algebras are Homotopy Algebras by Martin Markl

Answer by Will Jagy for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T17:04:53Z

Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes by Dr Daina Taimina (A K Peters), see

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/114989-crocheting-adventures-wins-diagram-2009.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookseller/Diagram_Prize_for_Oddest_Title_of_the_Year

http://hyperbolic-crochet.blogspot.com/

Answer by Sune Jakobsen for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T18:58:50Z

Noone beats Mick gets some (the odds are on his side) by V. Chvatal and B. Reed. It is an article about the satisfiability problem, and the title is of course referring to this song. I havn't read the article, and the only reason I know the it is its title.

Answer by Qiaochu Yuan for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T19:21:32Z

Simmons, F. W., When Homogeneous Continua Are Hausdorff Circles (or Yes, We Hausdorff Bananas), Continua, Decompositions, and Manifolds, University of Texas Press (1980) pp. 62-73. I think it's a reference to this song.

Answer by Robin Kothari for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T19:32:54Z

Quantum lower bounds by quantum arguments.

Answer by SandeepJ for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T20:20:28Z

Given the atmosphere of terror and fear in recent years, I did a double take when I first glanced at Bruce Berndt's paper "Ramanujan's association with radicals in India".

Answer by Gerry Myerson for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T20:27:37Z

I'll echo other comments that the question is wrong-headed, but I think it still serves a purpose.

Comment l'hypothese de Riemann ne fut pas prouvee (How the Riemann hypothesis was not proved), by P Cartier, Seminar on Number Theory, Paris 1980-81, Progr. Math., 22, Boston, MA: Birkhauser Boston, pp. 35-48, MR693308

Answer by James for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T20:32:44Z

My favourite : "My Graph", by H.S.M. Coxeter.

Answer by Michele Triestino for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T20:40:35Z

A Midsummer Knot's Dream, by Allison Henrich, Noël MacNaughton, Sneha Narayan, Oliver Pechenik, Robert Silversmith, Jennifer Townsend

It is quite funny to read

Answer by Jonas Meyer for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T20:44:59Z

"On $O_n$" by D.E. Evans. ($\mathcal{O_n}$ is notation Cuntz gave for the algebras he introduced in "Simple $C^*$ -algebras generated by isometries".)

Answer by Jonas Meyer for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T20:56:00Z

The book Free rings and their relations by P.M. Cohn.

Answer by John D. Cook for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T22:11:37Z

H=W

It's a paper showing that two methods of defining Sobolev spaces, one which uses H's with subscripts and superscripts and one that uses W's, give rise to the same spaces.

Thanks to Willie Wong for the following:

Citation information

@ARTICLE{MeySer1964,
  author = {Meyers, Norman G. and Serrin, James},
  title = {{H = W}},
  journal = {Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA},
  year = {1964},
  volume = {51},
  pages = {1055-1056},
  number = {6},
  file = {MeySer1964.pdf:MeySer1964.pdf:PDF},
  owner = {ww278},
  timestamp = {2010.05.03},
  url = {http://www.pnas.org/content/51/6/1055.short}
}

Answer by alex for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T23:12:55Z

A minus sign that used to annoy me but now I know why it is there by Peter Tingley.

Answer by darij grinberg for Most memorable titles

2010-10-31T23:39:07Z

Integrity of ghosts, by Gert Almkvist. Gert Almkvist's generalization of a mistake by Bourbaki, by Doron Zeilberger. (And a few more by the same author.) The Point of Pointless Topology, by Peter Johnstone. The absolute classic: Go To Statement Considered Harmful, by Edsger Dijkstra.

Answer by Gil Kalai for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T00:56:27Z

Late addition (March, '13): Long and Wigderson's " How discreet is the discrete log?."

Gale and Shapley's "College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage, " was a great title to a great paper. (link JSTOR)

"Moments in mathematics" Papers from the American Mathematical Society annual meeting held in San Antonio, Tex., January 20–22, 1987. Edited by Henry J. Landau. (Link: Google book)

This is about "moments" in the technical sense but the double meaning of the title is very cute. (There is also a book entitled "great moments in mathematics" with the ordinary meaning of moments.)

About 1-2 decades ago Sylvain Cappell and Shmuel Weinberger planned writing a book called "A piece of the action" about group actions. This is a memorable title but I think the book was not completed.

One obvious: Aigner and Ziegler's Proofs from the book. (Link: WikipediA)

Joel Spencer's title "Six standard deviations suffice." is also memorable. (Link: JSTOR)

Jack Edmonds',(1965) "Paths, Trees and Flowers". (Link: ps file.)

For some reasons I found the title "Defect Sauer results" of a paper by Bollobas and Radcliffe memorable. (Link)

Branko Grunbaum has a paper entiled "The importance of being straight" (I could not find a link), and Irit Dinur and Shmuel Safra have a paper entitled "On the importance of being biased". (A link to a later version with a different title.) (There is a paper by A. Dillof published in Michigan Law Review with very similar name.)

Jorg Wills had a memorable title "decomposable skeleta" for a paper he sent for the 100th birthday of a well known mathematician. But I think at the end he changed the title.

Saharon Shelah has several memorable titles like this one: "On what I do not understand (and have something to say). I" .Although, I forgot the most memorable one.

Answer by Gerald Edgar for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T01:25:22Z

Great Expectations: The Theory of Optimal Stopping, by Chow, Robbins, and Siegmund (1971)

Answer by David Roberts for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T01:47:26Z

I can't believe no one's mentioned this:

Some title containing the words "homotopy" and "symplectic", e.g. this one
Pavol Severa
arXiv:math/0105080

Answer by David Roberts for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T01:54:24Z

The hunting of the Hopf ring
Andrew Stacey and Sarah Whitehouse
Homology, Homotopy and Applications, Vol. 11 (2009), No. 2, pp.75-132.

referencing this poem. Much more memorable than the related works by the same authors:

Andrew Stacey and Sarah Whitehouse, Tall-Wraith monoids, in preparation, 2009.

Andrew Stacey and Sarah Whitehouse, Stable and unstable operations in mod p cohomology theories, Algebr. Geom. Topol. 8(2) (2008), 1059– 1091.

Answer by James for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T02:08:06Z

John Stallings' "How not to prove the Poincare Conjecture" is lovely.

Answer by Jérôme JEAN-CHARLES for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T02:12:50Z

The missing axiom of matroid theory is lost forever

A emotional variation on absolute negative results.
Refs : Vámos, Peter (1978), "The missing axiom of matroid theory is lost forever", Journal of the London Mathematical Society, II. Ser. 18: AT : http://jlms.oxfordjournals.org/content/s2-18/3/403.extract

Answer by Hsien-Chih Chang for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T02:34:11Z

I always like the title "Homology flows, cohomology cuts" by Chambers, Erickson and Nayyeri, which makes analog (a general technique indeed) to the well-known theorem (for graph theorists) "Maximum flows, minimum cuts".

Answer by N C for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T03:15:16Z

Division by three

Answer by Idoneal for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T05:29:33Z

Ideals and reality

projective modules and number of generators of ideals

By Friedrich Ischebeck and Ravi A. Rao

Answer by gordon-royle for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T06:11:26Z

And in the graph theory corner we have the famous Harary/Read paper "Is the null-graph a pointless concept?"

Answer by Alon Amit for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T06:15:46Z

"Holey Sheets" - Pfaffians and Subdeterminants as D-brane Operators in Large N Gauge Theories.

Answer by Gerry Myerson for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T11:36:15Z

A Group of Order 8,315,553,613,086,720,000 by J H Conway, Bull. London Math. Soc. (1969) 1 (1): 79-88, http://blms.oxfordjournals.org/content/1/1/79.extract

Maybe it's cheating to call this memorable - I remembered there was a Conway paper with a title of this type, but I certainly don't claim to have remembered the exact title!

Answer by slimton for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T11:50:21Z

Approximately counting up to four, by Luby and Vigoda.

Answer by Louigi Addario-Berry for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T12:45:05Z

Here is a list of papers in Theoretical Computer Science with cute titles. Some that I like from the list (aside from "Mick gets some" which is good enough to deserve its own answer anyway).

A Smaller Sleeping Bag for a Baby Snake
The Art of Pointless Thinking: a Student's Guide to the Category of Locales
Scott is not always sober

Also: Mangoes and Blueberries.

And in a similar vein, a quote from "Quotients homophone des groupes libres - Homophonic quotients of free groups," that appears on the first linked page page: "Ah, la recherche! Du temps perdu."

Answer by Vagabond for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T19:00:50Z

Fractured Fractals And Broken Dreams. Self-similar Geometry through Metric and Measure. Guy David, Stephen Semmes.

http://www.oup.com.au/titles/academic/maths/9780198501664

This is the most unusual title of a book which I have ever come across. I discovered this while randomly browsing through books in the library and got hooked. I was an undergraduate then and it had a strange attraction to me, even though I could not figure out anything that was written in it then.

I was not the only one!

Our university used to put out a list of courses (in the good old days) which were going to be offered and students would choose from it. Some of us managed to add the name of this book against the fractal geometry course as a course material. A record number of students enlisted.

Within a week a record number of them wanted to opt out. So there were inquiries: it turned out most of the students cited that they found the title of the book mentioned in the course material attractive which prompted them to enlist.

(We had found in the previous year that the instructor did not care about teaching, insist on taking class at 8 in the morning and would religiously take attendance for 10 minutes, by the end of the class half the class would be snoring. The assignments were to be submitted on A4 paper, we were supposed to write on one side with appropriate margin.

It was a case of a pun / warning which had gone horribly wrong. )

Answer by Andy Putman for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T19:33:54Z

The following is not quite as arresting as the other titles listed, but Stallings has a paper in Inventiones entitled "The topology of finite graphs". It's a pretty gutsy title, but what's even more impressive is that it is a fairly good description of what the paper contains (namely, a totally new approach to studying questions about subgroups of free groups using finite graphs; this is totally different from the classical approach using covering spaces of graphs)!

Answer by Michael Hardy for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T20:01:55Z

Would a book titled Calculus Made Honest get me burned at the stake for heresy?

Or would it merely confuse mathematicians who don't understand what is in need of being made honest in that topic?

Later edit: This question illustrates nicely the emotional nature of the anonymous voting system. Robin Chapman commented: "So, it isn't an actual title, and so this reply is not an answer to the original question."

That proves that he never read the original question and didn't know what it said. Probably he drew an inference about its content from the many answers. Then people rushed in with "down" votes. I invite anyone who has doubts about this to read the original question by Suvrit, and I invite Robin Chapman to read it for the first time.

[Original answer by Michael Hardy.]

Answer by Michael Hardy for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T20:05:36Z

Ancestors, Cardinals, and Representatives by T. D. Parsons.

Answer by Michael Hardy for Most memorable titles

2010-11-01T20:09:45Z

My Ph.D. thesis is titled Why Logical Probabilists Need Real Numbers. (But I haven't published any paper with that title.)

Answer by Olivier for Most memorable titles

2010-11-02T10:05:00Z

I don't think $\textbf{L'endoscopie tordue n'est pas si tordue}$ (Twisted endoscopy is not so twisted) de J.-L. Waldspurger has been mentioned yet.

Answer by Peter Humphries for Most memorable titles

2010-11-02T11:17:37Z

I'm quite surprised that no one has mentioned The Joy of Sets.

Answer by Steven Landsburg for Most memorable titles

2010-11-02T14:10:49Z

Bob Thomason's "Beware the Phony Multiplication on Quillen's $A^{-1}A$".

Answer by mathphysicist for Most memorable titles

2010-11-03T04:40:28Z

Some nice titles from B.A. Kupersmidt:

KP or mKP (a book)
Dark equations (an article)

Answer by Michael Hardy for Most memorable titles

2010-11-03T19:19:55Z

Paul Halmos' Applied Mathematics is Bad Mathematics is certainly a memorable title, notwithstanding the wrong-headedness of what at least superficially appears to be its thesis.

Answer by Peter Arndt for Most memorable titles

2010-11-04T00:05:27Z

Theorems for free! by Philip Wadler

From the abstract: ... This provides a free source of useful theorems, courtesy of Reynolds' abstraction theorem for the polymorphic lambda calculus.

Answer by Neil Strickland for Most memorable titles

2010-11-04T00:10:05Z

There are not exactly five objects by Andreas Blass

Answer by Richard Wentworth for Most memorable titles

2010-11-04T01:27:18Z

Ben Andrews' : "Gauss curvature flow: the fate of the rolling stones"

Answer by Maxime Bourrigan for Most memorable titles

2010-11-04T08:37:31Z

Todd's "The 'odd' number six."

Answer by Jim Bryan for Most memorable titles

2010-11-04T23:36:02Z

Mark Van Raamsdonk's Princeton PhD thesis in string theory was called "Making the most out of zero branes and a weak background". Priceless.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2000PhDT........40V

Answer by Lamine for Most memorable titles

2010-11-05T16:14:13Z

I really like humor in scientific texts, specially in titles. One of my favorite authors is Donald E. Knuth. A title like The sandwich theorem makes me curious about its content. The Art of Computer Programming is also a nice title.

Answer by Gil Kalai for Most memorable titles

2010-11-05T16:21:32Z

There are some rather obvious aspects to the question that perhaps should be mentioned.

"For a large number of readers, the choice whether they select to read a paper or not is often strongly influenced by the title."

Yes, but it is also strongly influenced by the abstract and introduction.

"I was wondering if the MO-users would be willing to share their wisdom with me on what makes the title of a paper memorable for them; or perhaps just cite an example of title they find memorable?"

Since most answers refereed to the second part, perhaps it is worth answering the first part of the question as well. Perhaps the main thing that makes the title (and paper) memorable is the content of the paper.

"This advice would be very helpful in helping me (and perhaps others) in designing better, more informative titles (not only for papers, but also for example, for MO questions)."

Overall, the reaction in the mathematics community to catchy titles, personal descriptions, jokes of various kind, and various other things that can be seen as PR-related or "salesmenship" are mixed. So while it is always good to have a clear title having an overlly catchy title can also backfire.

Answer by roy smith for Most memorable titles

2010-11-06T21:43:17Z

I always remember the paper entitled "On groups of order one." It turned out the title referred to groups defined by generators and relations, so the problem was to determine when a set of elements (together with its conjugates) generated a free group. I cannot imagine any mathematician who would not look at this paper to see what it was about.

Answer by John Jiang for Most memorable titles

2010-11-06T22:39:00Z

Lovasz's "Hit and Run Is Fast and Fun". In that he proved the hit run algorithm on sampling from log concave distributions on a convex set in the Euclidean space has a polynomial mixing time, hence fast.

Answer by Max for Most memorable titles

2010-11-07T06:59:41Z

Street-Fighting Mathematics by Sanjoy Mahajan is about estimation, Fermi calculations, dimensional analysis and so on.

I haven't read it yet, but the title was certainly enough to get me to download it.

Answer by Daniel Geisler for Most memorable titles

2010-11-08T07:06:32Z

Knobel's wonderful paper on the constant rediscovery of iterated exponentials.

R. Knobel. "Exponentials Reiterated." American Mathematical Monthly 88, (1981), p. 235-252.

Answer by Ross Millikan for Most memorable titles

2010-11-10T05:00:18Z

Not math, but Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow is hard to beat

Answer by Mariano Suárez-Alvarez for Most memorable titles

2010-11-16T04:54:53Z

Addictive Number Theory, by Melvyn B. Nathanson.

Answer by S. Sra for Most memorable titles

2010-11-17T21:39:23Z

I just saw the very curious title:

An Operator-Like Description of Love Affairs

by: Fabio Bagarello and Francesco Oliveri SIAM J. Appl. Math. Volume 70, Issue 8, pp. 3235-3251 (2010)

And with the report of this title, I also admit that this title belongs to the category of memorable titles, without first needing to read the paper. The abstract of the paper is also quite curious!

Answer by Gabriel Benamy for Most memorable titles

2010-11-17T23:00:29Z

"What is infinity factorial (and why might we care)?"

The only downside is that it isn't actually typed up, but rather is hand-written and scanned, but the result of $\infty! = \sqrt{2\pi}$ is still rather intriguing.

Answer by Leon Lampret for Most memorable titles

2010-12-04T23:05:03Z

Mathematical Fallacies, Flaws and Flimflam was definitely by far the most memorable title I have ever read. Also A Taste of Topology seemed tasty.

But I would also like to stress, that to me, the books that have the most 'classical' and 'general' titles, seem the most appealing. Eg.

etc.

Answer by Gerald Edgar for Most memorable titles

2010-12-07T00:39:08Z

How to Gamble If You Must by Lester E. Dubins & Leonard J. Savage

Answer by Andrew D. King for Most memorable titles

2010-12-14T18:30:17Z

Finding even sets even faster.

The last fraction of a fractional conjecture.

Answer by Jon Bannon for Most memorable titles

2010-12-14T20:54:49Z

"Fun with $\mathbb{F}_{1}$"

http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.2401

Quite a decent pun, I think.

Answer by Mark Bennet for Most memorable titles

2010-12-14T21:48:37Z

One title I delight in having on my bookshelf is "Introduction to Group Characters" by Walter Ledermann - if you know it's a maths book the title makes complete sense. But a non-mathematician imagines a completely different kind of content.

Answer by none for Most memorable titles

2010-12-15T00:52:11Z

There's an algebra book called "Rings and Ideals". I thought of a subtitle: "Marriage during the Revolution".

I remember reading Jacobson's "Basic Algebra I" on the bus on the way to university, and someone noticing it and thinking it was a high-school level text.

Similarly, Serre(?) has a difficult book about number theory, titled simply "Arithmetic".

Answer by Dick Palais for Most memorable titles

2010-12-28T20:32:03Z

I hope it is OK to mention "A Disorienting Look at Euler's Theorem on the Axis of a Rotation" even if I am a joint author, particularly if I admit that none of the authors thought up the cute title---it was the editor. (The cute part is the somewhat subtle use of "disorienting", namely we prove Euler's Theorem for orthogonal transformations that are not proper---i.e., don't preserve orientation.) You can download it here:

http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=3542&pf=1

Answer by Marcin Kotowski for Most memorable titles

2010-12-28T20:41:53Z

"I know I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque" by Gady Kozma and Ariel Yadin (http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.4258)

Answer by Douglas Bowman for Most memorable titles

2010-12-29T01:30:19Z

I have always found the book title "Prolegomena to a Middlebrow Arithmetic of Curves of Genus 2" by Cassels and Flynn to be quite memorable.

Answer by monodromy for Most memorable titles

2010-12-30T23:36:18Z

J.-M. FONTAINE Il n'y a pas de variété abélienne sur Z Invent. Math. (1985) 81, 515-538

Answer by Michael Renardy for Most memorable titles

2010-12-30T23:51:55Z

"A survey of finite differences of opinion on numerical muddling of the incomprehensible defective confusion equation" by B.P. Leonard

Answer by Linda Polytope for Most memorable titles

2010-12-31T04:12:53Z

My memory is marked by the titles of two papers by Branko Grünbaum:

Branko Grünbaum. `Are your polyhedra the same as my polyhedra?' Discrete and comput. Geom.: the Goodman-Pollack Festschrift, ed. B. Aronov et al, Springer (2003), pp. 461-488.
Branko Grünbaum. `The Bilinski Dodecahedron and Assorted Parallelohedra, Zonohedra, Monohedra, Isozonohedra, and Otherhedra'. The Mathematical Intelligencer (2010). DOI: 10.1007/s00283-010-9138-7.

The first title is easy for me to recall whenever I need to refer to the paper. The second title sounds fancy (though the article itself is not) and, more importantly, is unpronounceable by me, therefore I have put some stretch of mental effort into memorising it.

As to the original question---What makes the title of a paper memorable?---, personally, when I look for things to read, my attention tends to be captured by titles that are short and sweet, for instance, Jean-Pierre Serre's Trees, Ken Brown's Buildings. These monographs/papers usually turn out to be the authorative treaties of the topics, with material unforgettable for one working in the field.

Answer by Ben Linowitz for Most memorable titles

2011-01-31T00:42:36Z

A Tale of Two Sieves by Carl Pomerance

Answer by Jamie Weigandt for Most memorable titles

2011-01-31T05:48:54Z

De Weger and Pinter wrote this paper entitled:

$$210 = 14 \times 15 = 5 \times 6 \times 7 = \binom{21}{2} = \binom{10}{4}$$

Answer by Denis Serre for Most memorable titles

2011-04-06T15:42:48Z

A mathematical theory of the guillotine, by Plero Villaggio, Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis (1990) Vol. 110, pp 93-101.

Answer by Leo Alonso for Most memorable titles

2011-04-06T16:08:00Z

I like the second part of:

Breuil, Christophe; Conrad, Brian; Diamond, Fred; Taylor, Richard "On the modularity of elliptic curves over $\mathbf{Q}$: wild 3-adic exercises."

MR1839918 (2002d:11058)

They prove the remaining cases of the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture: "every elliptic curve is modular".

Answer by Margaret Friedland for Most memorable titles

2011-05-02T19:18:11Z

Most colorful:

MR1371379 (97g:60105) Chung, Kai Lai: Green, Brown, and probability. World Scientific Publishing Co., Inc., River Edge, NJ, 1995. xiv+106 pp. ISBN: 981-02-2453-2; 981-02-2533-4

The book discusses connection between potential theory (in particular Green's function for Laplace equation) and probability (in particular Brownian motions).

Answer by Margaret Friedland for Most memorable titles

2011-05-02T19:36:10Z

Another one: MR1274760 (95d:30040) Carleson, Lennart(S-RIT); Jones, Peter W.(1-YALE); Yoccoz, Jean-Christophe(F-PARIS11) Julia and John. (English summary) Bol. Soc. Brasil. Mat. (N.S.) 25 (1994), no. 1, 1–30.

The preprint wad even more memorable title: In Carleson and Gamelin's book on complex dynamics it was referred to as: When is Julia John?

Answer by Mariano Suárez-Alvarez for Most memorable titles

2011-05-03T06:06:27Z

[Smale, Stephen. The story of the higher-dimensional Poincaré conjecture (what actually happened on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro). A joint AMS-MAA invited address presented in Phoenix, Arizona, January 1989. AMS-MAA Joint Lecture Series. American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 1989. 1 videocassette (NTSC; 1/2 inch; VHS) (60 min.); sd., col. MR1057609 (91g:01035)]

It's a video, but it's Smale, so...

Answer by Giuseppe for Most memorable titles

2011-05-05T16:55:57Z

Larry Bates, Monodromy in the champagne bottle.

Answer by Abhinav Kumar for Most memorable titles

2011-05-05T19:58:58Z

The weird and wonderful chemistry of audioactive decay, by John Conway.

Answer by Harrison Brown for Most memorable titles

2011-05-08T13:35:07Z

I'm a big fan of "Excluding a Forest": technically precise, to the point, but just mysterious enough to grab the attention. I've said before that it ought to be the name of a band. ("Taming a vortex" is also good.)

Answer by Pål GD for Most memorable titles

2011-05-08T14:12:09Z

From the top of my head comes the papers

Domination When The Stars Are Out, D Hermelin, M Mnich, EJ van Leeuwen, G Woeginger
Looking At The Stars, E Prieto & C Sloper
Leftovers from the Ham Sandwich Theorem, G Byrnes, G Cairns and B Jessup

But also, Cox & Zucker, who in Intersection numbers of sections of elliptic surfaces creates the algorithm later named the Cox-Zucker machine

Answer by Asaf Karagila for Most memorable titles

2011-05-08T14:59:31Z

There was the fuss about The Yellow Cake, a joint paper of Saharon Shelah and Andrzej Roslanowski.

They also co-authored several other funnily titled papers, amongst them are such names as:

Answer by Todd Trimble for Most memorable titles

2011-05-08T15:47:59Z

You'd think that with John H. Conway around, this should be like shooting fish in a barrel. One title that comes to mind is

The Sensual (Quadratic) Form

and there are more goodies if you look at his bibliography. For example,

Character Calisthenics

The $\sqrt{\text{Monster}}$ Construction

I also like the paper (both the title and the contents!) by Andreas Blass,

Seven Trees in One

Answer by Karl Schwede for Most memorable titles

2011-05-08T16:55:36Z

Here are a few that jump to my mind.

Young person's guide to canonical singularities by Miles Reid, 1985.

Twenty-five years of 3-folds—an old person's view by Miles Reid, 2000.

Tendencious survey of 3-folds, by Miles Reid, 1985 (same book, Bowdoin -- Algebraic Geometry, as the first one).

On the ubiquity of Gorenstein rings by Hyman Bass, 1963. This also seems to be the first paper with the word ubiquity in the title (via a mathscinet search).

Another one that jumps to my mind is the various Pathologies papers of Mumford.

Answer by Jeremy Kahn for Most memorable titles

2011-05-08T19:39:22Z

On manifolds homeomorphic to the 7-sphere

In which Milnor proves there is more than one.

Answer by Tom Goodwillie for Most memorable titles

2011-05-08T21:26:41Z

Speaking of Milnor and such things, have we already done [Edit: Kervaire-Milnor's] "Groups of Homotopy Spheres"?

Answer by Pait for Most memorable titles

2011-05-08T22:40:04Z

One of my favorite titles from control theory is a 1978 paper by John Doyle entitled "Guaranteed Margins for LQG Regulators." It is memorable because of the abstract "There are none." The paper shows that optimal controls may be fragile; the 3-word abstract says it all.

Answer by Belanov for Most memorable titles

2011-05-12T13:18:30Z

The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis. Alan Turing.

A math paper use chemical principles explaining biological phenomenon.

Answer by Wadim Zudilin for Most memorable titles

2011-07-11T13:43:00Z

Why Knot? by Colin Adams.

Answer by Artem Pelenitsyn for Most memorable titles

2011-07-11T15:02:04Z

“Kindergarten Quantum Mechanics” by Bob Coecke / arXiv:quant-ph/0510032v1

Answer by Giuseppe for Most memorable titles

2011-08-23T08:31:48Z

Larry Bates, "You can't get there from here", Differential Geometry and its Applications 8.3 (1998): 273-274

Answer by Brendan Foreman for Most memorable titles

2011-08-23T10:34:41Z

I've always enjoyed the poetry of the title:

"Period three implies chaos" -- T.-Y. Li & J. A. Yorke

Answer by Quinn Culver for Most memorable titles

2011-08-23T12:15:21Z

"A short tale of hybrid mice", by Grigor Sargsyan.

Answer by Andrew T. Barker for Most memorable titles

2011-08-23T18:41:03Z

"The 40 billionth binary digit of pi is 1", D. Bailey and P. Borwein.

Answer by Maxime Bourrigan for Most memorable titles

2011-08-23T20:26:11Z

You can find in Serre's Œuvres (volume IV) an article titled $\Delta = b^2 - 4ac$.