# Most memorable titles

Given the vast number of new papers / preprints that hit the internet everyday, one factor that may help papers stand out for a broader, though possibly more casual, audience is their title. This view was my motivation for asking this question almost 7 years ago (wow!), and it remains equally true today (those who subscribe to arXiv feeds, MO feeds, etc., may agree).

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 Moler and van Loan.

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: Amongst the various "memorable" titles reported, some of the following 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!
• I'd have put in "A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Big Game Hunting" as an answer, but that's carrying a joke too far I think. Oct 31 '10 at 15:19
• Entertaining as this list may be, I seriously doubt that it will be a useful prescriptive guide as to how to title one's papers. Editors' and readers' tastes also change over the years Oct 31 '10 at 19:35
• Since this question seems to have turned into a big list of "memorable/amusing paper titles," ignoring the primary question "what makes the title of a paper memorable?", perhaps it might be helpful to re-ask that question but without the loophole "...or perhaps just cite an example of title they find memorable". Nov 1 '10 at 0:23
• I have now caught a duplicate answer for the second time in as many days on this thread. To me this casts doubt on the usefulness of this thread, but I acknowledge that I have a long-standing bias against these types of questions, which from previous discussions on meta seems not to be shared by most people Nov 2 '10 at 1:19
• For some reason no further answers can be posted, so let me share with you Continuing horrors of topology without choice by C. Good and I.J. Tree, and related to that Horrors of topology without AC: A nonnormal orderable space by E.K. van Douwen, Disasters in topology without the axiom of choice by K. Keremedis, Disasters in metric topology without choice by E. Tachtsis. May 23 '14 at 14:26

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

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

Larry Bates, Monodromy in the champagne bottle.

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

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

However the question is about papers but it is worth mentioning the title of Ketonen's PhD thesis: "Everything You Wanted to Know About Ultrafilters But Were Afraid to Ask" !

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).

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.

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

Gaetano Fichera's "Avere una memoria tenace crea gravi problemi" [Having a persistent memory creates serious problems], (Italian), Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis 70, 101-112 (1979), MR1553577, Zbl 0425.73002.

The title is a pun to introduce the Author's analysis of time dependent kernels in continuum mechanics: he shows that, while Volterra type kernels (i.e. kernels which are zero before a fixed time $$t$$ in the past) can be used in the integrodifferential equations of elasticity without affecting existence and uniqueness results involved, the use of general kernels make these results strongly dependent of the topology of the function space on which the problem is posed. The pun is also explained with an analogy at the end of the paper.

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.

• There's a Wikipdia article titled ''group action''. What must the lay reader expect it to be about? Dec 29 '10 at 2:11
• Reminds my of books with titles like "Theory of normal families". I've been told that one of these could be found in the "social sciences" section the university library in Bremen...
– Dirk
Dec 17 '12 at 18:54

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.)

• The link in the post no longer works. A quick google search suggests that it might be probably one of the papers Graph minors. I. Excluding a forest or Quickly excluding a forest. Jul 23 '20 at 9:47

On manifolds homeomorphic to the 7-sphere

In which Milnor proves there is more than one.

"K-theory doesn't exist" by Ethan Akin: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022404978900324

"Walking the dog" refers to finding parametrizations $$a : \left[0,1\right]\to C$$ and $$b : \left[0,1\right]\to D$$ of two curves $$C$$ and $$D$$ such that $$\max_{t\in\left[0,1\right]} \left|\left|a\left(t\right) - b\left(t\right)\right|\right|$$ is as small as possible -- or at least smaller than a given cutoff value. The metaphor is a person walking along curve $$C$$ while keeping a dog on a leash walking along curve $$D$$. The famous "simultaneous mountain climbers" puzzle has a cameo.

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

• And... why do they? Nov 1 '10 at 21:00
• Start by thinking of probabilities as belonging to some partially ordered set lacking such amenities as the operations of addition and multiplication. Then under certain assumptions that are reasonable in some epistemic situations, one can show that they might as well be real numbers with the usual order and the usual operations. Nov 1 '10 at 22:28
• Doesn't a PhD thesis count as a paper? Dec 5 '10 at 10:51
• @Zsbán: Maybe it's a matter of convention. I haven't submitted anything to a journal with this title, but maybe I should have. My thesis contained some big sections explaining some background material to my advisor. I did write a paper on the same general topic with the unexciting title "Scaled Boolean Algebras". Dec 5 '10 at 22:23

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.

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

• The link gives a pdf with the title "Descriptive inner model theory". (At least now.) Aug 12 '20 at 18:55

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.

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".

My personal favorite is Elisabetta A. Matsumoto's:

"The Taming of the Screw: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Elliptic Functions"

which can be found here. It is a very good read, and the title extremely seamlessly references both Shakespeare and Dr.Strangelove; two of my favorites.

• And a nod to Henry James as well! Aug 6 at 9:36

Some nice titles from B.A. Kupersmidt:

The Chekanov torus in S2×S2 is not real. Quite a philosophical title and I could never forget about it...

The book of Serge Lang: $$\mathrm{SL}_2(\Bbb R)$$.

Lang, Serge, $$\mathrm{SL}_2(\Bbb R)$$, Reading, Mass. etc.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. XVI, 428 p. \$19.50 (1975). ZBL0311.22001.

• Serge Lang: Too Real. Apr 10 at 11:21

Mickley, Smith and Korchak's Fluid flow in packed beds.

(No-one in fluid mechanics seems to be willing to see the innuendo. They all want to explain the effect on the Reynolds number. And they hate it if you snigger when they mention turbulence.)

Using the Logistic Map to Generate Scratching Sounds

The first sentence in the abstract:

This article presents a mathematical model for generating annoying scratching sounds.

The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis. Alan Turing.

A math paper use chemical principles explaining biological phenomenon.

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.]

• Is Calculus Made Honest an actual title? Nov 2 '10 at 11:00
• Could the anonymous persons who voted this down step forward and say something in this comment space? I am mystified by this reaction, so an explanation could be useful. I think the denizens of this forum should be competent to express themselves verbally; I think if I had something critical to say about a posting that I thought was worth voting down, I would say something. But no one has in this case. Nov 3 '10 at 12:56
• So, it isn't an actual title, and so this reply is not an answer to the original question. Nov 4 '10 at 11:33
• Just to be completely clear: Robin Chapman is confused. He says I wasn't answering the original question, simply because my answer didn't give a title of a published paper. But the original question was not ONLY a request for such titles. Apparently Robin Chapman didn't finish reading the original question, and then he drew this conclusion that he would see to be incorrect if he had read it. Nov 8 '10 at 16:31
• Robin Chapman is asserting elsewhere that I posted this answer only as a pretext for a polemic. At this point I can only surmise that he views my comments above as a polemic, and thinks that I posted for the purpose of posting those. But I posted them only in reply to Robin Chapman's question that I'd have thought he'd already know the answer to, because of the way I phrased my posting. Nov 8 '10 at 19:16