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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:

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!
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    $\begingroup$ 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. $\endgroup$
    – J. M. isn't a mathematician
    Commented Oct 31, 2010 at 15:19
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    $\begingroup$ 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 $\endgroup$
    – Yemon Choi
    Commented Oct 31, 2010 at 19:35
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    $\begingroup$ 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". $\endgroup$
    – Mike Shulman
    Commented Nov 1, 2010 at 0:23
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    $\begingroup$ 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 $\endgroup$
    – Yemon Choi
    Commented Nov 2, 2010 at 1:19
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    $\begingroup$ 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. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Brandenburg
    Commented May 23, 2014 at 14:26

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I just saw the very curious title:

An Operator-Like Description of Love Affairs

by: Fabio Bagarello and Francesco Oliveri SIAM J. Appl. Math. Volume 70, Issue 8, pp. 3235-3251 (2010)

And with the report of this title, I also admit that this title belongs to the category of memorable titles, without first needing to read the paper. The abstract of the paper is also quite curious!

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[Smale, Stephen. The story of the higher-dimensional Poincaré conjecture (what actually happened on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro). A joint AMS-MAA invited address presented in Phoenix, Arizona, January 1989. AMS-MAA Joint Lecture Series. American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 1989. 1 videocassette (NTSC; 1/2 inch; VHS) (60 min.); sd., col. MR1057609 (91g:01035)]

It's a video, but it's Smale, so...

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On manifolds homeomorphic to the 7-sphere

In which Milnor proves there is more than one.

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Ancestors, Cardinals, and Representatives by T. D. Parsons.

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    $\begingroup$ Could the (apparently anonymous at this time) person who voted this one down explain their rationale? This posting is similar in content to many of those above that were voted up. $\endgroup$
    – Michael Hardy
    Commented Nov 3, 2010 at 12:49
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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.

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    $\begingroup$ Serge Lang: Too Real. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila ♦
    Commented Apr 10, 2021 at 11:21
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On the more applied side of things, I'm quite fond of the following (sub)title:

Estimating the number of unseen species: A bird in the hand is worth $\log n$ in the bush

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Knobel's wonderful paper on the constant rediscovery of iterated exponentials.

R. Knobel. "Exponentials Reiterated." American Mathematical Monthly 88, (1981), p. 235-252.

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

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Larry Bates, Monodromy in the champagne bottle.

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

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  • $\begingroup$ There = a hotel? $\endgroup$
    – Tom Copeland
    Commented Oct 20, 2021 at 17:38
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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.

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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

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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.

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

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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).

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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.

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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.

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Mathematical physics, for the allusion: "The Unbearable Beingness of Light, Dressing and Undressing Photons in Black Hole Spacetimes" by Timothy J. Hollowood, Graham M. Shore

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    $\begingroup$ Hint: Czech writer $\endgroup$
    – Tom Copeland
    Commented Oct 20, 2021 at 22:21
  • $\begingroup$ Must read the book or see the movie (PG recommended for the young, preferably nontoxic, sexually secure parents) to understand the full set of puns in the title. $\endgroup$
    – Tom Copeland
    Commented Nov 5, 2021 at 2:15
  • $\begingroup$ Ah, the Czech author of "The Unbearable . . ." just passed. Several fine eulogies were given on EU public broadcasting channels. $\endgroup$
    – Tom Copeland
    Commented Jul 22, 2023 at 0:15
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My Ph.D. thesis is titled Why Logical Probabilists Need Real Numbers. (But I haven't published any paper with that title.)

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  • $\begingroup$ And... why do they? $\endgroup$
    – darij grinberg
    Commented Nov 1, 2010 at 21:00
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    $\begingroup$ 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. $\endgroup$
    – Michael Hardy
    Commented Nov 1, 2010 at 22:28
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    $\begingroup$ Doesn't a PhD thesis count as a paper? $\endgroup$
    – Zsbán Ambrus
    Commented Dec 5, 2010 at 10:51
  • $\begingroup$ @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". $\endgroup$
    – Michael Hardy
    Commented Dec 5, 2010 at 22:23
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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.

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    $\begingroup$ There's a Wikipdia article titled ''group action''. What must the lay reader expect it to be about? $\endgroup$
    – Michael Hardy
    Commented Dec 29, 2010 at 2:11
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    $\begingroup$ 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... $\endgroup$
    – Dirk
    Commented Dec 17, 2012 at 18:54
  • $\begingroup$ When I was in charge of acquiring books for our math-library, books on "Group therapy" or similar stuff showed sometimes up in a list of math-books. $\endgroup$
    – Roland Bacher
    Commented Aug 6, 2022 at 14:25
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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.)

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    $\begingroup$ 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. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jul 23, 2020 at 9:47
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    $\begingroup$ @MartinSleziak Based on the fact that the broken URL has the string coverDate=9/31/1983, I'm fairly sure that it is meant to point to the paper "Graph minors. I. Excluding a forest". This article is available at doi:10.1016/0095-8956(83)90079-5 (Zbl 0521.05062). $\endgroup$
    – The Amplitwist
    Commented May 7, 2023 at 9:36
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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.

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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.

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

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  • $\begingroup$ The link gives a pdf with the title "Descriptive inner model theory". (At least now.) $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Aug 12, 2020 at 18:55
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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".

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The Chekanov torus in $S^2\times S^2$ is not real. Quite a philosophical title and I could never forget about it...

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  • $\begingroup$ I had a working title on a paper of "On a virtual object which may not exist". Sadly I didn't have the gumption to follow through. $\endgroup$
    – JP McCarthy
    Commented Feb 17 at 7:57
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"49598666989151226098104244512918" by Michael Filaseta and Samuel Gross

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    $\begingroup$ Is this really memorable? $\endgroup$
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Commented Jan 3, 2023 at 16:20
  • $\begingroup$ @Sil I think Emil Jeřábek was intending a pun on the difficulty to memorize that hell of a number. $\endgroup$
    – Alessandro Della Corte
    Commented Jan 3, 2023 at 22:46
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    $\begingroup$ I'm torn between "🎶 Jenny, I've got your number 🎶" and wondering if this is the new UK emergency number. $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Jul 12 at 21:38
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Some nice titles from B.A. Kupersmidt:

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