Question

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:

1. A title can be memorable, attractive, or even both (to oversimplify a bit);
2. A title becomes truly memorable if the accompanying paper had memorable substance
3. A title can be attractive even without having memorable material
4. To reach the broadest audience, attractive titles are good, though mathematicians might sometimes feel irritated by needlessly cute titles
5. 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
6. 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 1

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 2

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

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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 7

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

Answer 8

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

Answer 9

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 10

The book _$A=B$_.

Answer 11

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

Answer 12

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 13

"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 14

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 15

Everybody knows what a Hopf algebra is

Answer 16

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

Answer 17

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

Answer 18

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 19

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 20

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

Answer 21

Division by three

Answer 22

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 23

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

Answer 24

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 25

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

Answer 26

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 27

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 28

There are not exactly five objects by Andreas Blass

Answer 29

Atiyah's K-Theory and Reality

Answer 30

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}
}