One paper that I want to share with any of my colleagues, although it is not in my field, is Doyle and Conway, Division by Three, math/0605779v1.
To emphasize why this paper is so great, let me quote the entirety of the conclusion (saving you the trouble of reading the rest of the paper):
What’s wrong with the axiom of choice?
Part of our aversion to using the axiom of choice stems from our view that it
is probably not ‘true’. A theorem of Cohen shows that the axiom of choice is
independent of the other axioms of ZF, which means that neither it nor its
negation can be proved from the other axioms, providing that these axioms
are consistent. Thus as far as the rest of the standard axioms are concerned,
there is no way to decide whether the axiom of choice is true or false. This
leads us to think that we had better reject the axiom of choice on account
of Murphy’s Law that ‘if anything can go wrong, it will’. This is really no
more than a personal hunch about the world of sets. We simply don’t believe
that there is a function that assigns to each non-empty set of real numbers
one of its elements. While you can describe a selection function that will
work for finite sets, closed sets, open sets, analytic sets, and so on, Cohen’s
result implies that there is no hope of describing a definite choice function
that will work for ‘all’ non-empty sets of real numbers, at least as long as
you remain within the world of standard Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. And if
you can’t describe such a function, or even prove that it exists without using
some relative of the axiom of choice, what makes you so sure there is such a
thing?
Not that we believe there really are any such things as infinite sets, or that
the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms for set theory are necessarily even consistent.
Indeed, we’re somewhat doubtful whether large natural numbers (like 805000,
or even 2200) exist in any very real sense, and we’re secretly hoping that
Nelson will succeed in his program for proving that the usual axioms of
arithmetic—and hence also of set theory—are inconsistent. (See [E. Nelson. Predicative Arithmetic. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1986.])
All the more reason, then, for us to stick with methods which, because of their
concrete, combinatorial nature, are likely to survive the possible collapse of
set theory as we know it today.
