# 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. – J. M. isn't a mathematician 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 – Yemon Choi 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". – Mike Shulman 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 – Yemon Choi 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. – Martin Brandenburg May 23 '14 at 14:26

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

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

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

On manifolds homeomorphic to the 7-sphere

In which Milnor proves there is more than one.

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

Andrew Ranicki and the late John Roe were writing

Surgery for Amateurs

A spectacularly funny title, I think.

The incomplete, but very nice, notes can be found online. Thanks again to Nigel Higson for his lovely talk remembering John Roe in the UK Virtual Operator Algebras Seminar.

• Does "Virtual" modify "Operator", or "Algebra", or "Seminar"? – Gerry Myerson Jul 23 at 22:29
• @Gerry Myerson: the seminar is virtual, not the operator algebras. :) – Jon Bannon Jul 24 at 14:04

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

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.

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? – Michael Hardy 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. – Martin Sleziak Jul 23 at 9:47

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

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).

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 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? – darij grinberg 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. – Michael Hardy Nov 1 '10 at 22:28
• Doesn't a PhD thesis count as a paper? – Zsbán Ambrus 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". – Michael Hardy Dec 5 '10 at 22:23

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

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

Some nice titles from B.A. Kupersmidt:

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" !

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.

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.