Searching for $C^*$ I am trying to search on MathSciNet for articles which contains $C^*$ in their title (as in $C^*$-algebras) however I can't figure out how to get MathSciNet not to interpret the '*' as a stand in for an arbitrary sequence of characters.
(I am moving this question from MathStackExchange as no one there seemed to have an answer.)
 A: There seem to be some deficiencies in that search interface. They don't use safe HTML encoding to sanitize the input. Try the following "Title":
<script type="math/tex">Something's wrong...
and you get some kind of crash.
It would be nice to have an escape character like \ so that you could write \* to get a *, but I guess in light of the above it's not surprising that there's not.
A: I have emailed technical support at MathSciNet. Unfortunately they do not know how to search for a string containing a *, as * is interpreted as a wild card. However, if you know the word before and after the * then you can use the proximity search tool adjN which is a stand in for at most N-1 words. 
For example, searching for "C adj2 algebra" will find "$C^*$-algebra", as well as "l.m.c. algebras". 
A: MR often encodes the star with \ast. Searching for that in the title gives 4618 hits, not all of which have to do $\mathrm C^\ast$-algebras; searching for C adj2 \ast or C adj6 \ast still gives 1943 (resp. 1973), almost all of which seem relevant.
