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

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

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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 4

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

Answer 5

Everybody knows what a Hopf algebra is

Answer 6

On the Dreaded Right Bousfield Localization by C. Barwick.

Answer 7

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

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

Answer 8

Atiyah's K-Theory and Reality

Answer 9

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

Answer 10

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 11

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

Answer 12

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

Answer 13

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

Answer 14

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 15

The book _$A=B$_.

Answer 16

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 17

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 18

Homotopy Algebras are Homotopy Algebras by Martin Markl

Answer 19

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 20

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 21

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 22

Quantum lower bounds by quantum arguments.

Answer 23

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 24

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 25

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

Answer 26

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 27

"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 28

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

Answer 29

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 30

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