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It is always interesting when I meet professors in other sciences, particularly biology, to see their reaction when the issue of author names on papers comes up. The last time this happened, I was speaking to a cancer researcher at Harvard medical school. When I told him that author names in math are universally in alphabetical order his eyes got really, really big. He was amazed because he couldn't imagine how you could figure out by such conventions who did what amount of the work and he then explained to me some intricate rules by which researchers in biology determine the placement of author names. I told him that one plus of this alphabetical convention in math is that we don't need to deal with all the games they play in biology about who goes where at the start of the paper.