# nLab punny title

Many mathematics titles (not to mention the names for notions) like to involve a game of double meanings, repetition, wit, connotations, seeming absurdity, self-referencing, self-mockery and the like. I propose creating list of some known examples of such titles in areas of our interest. Maybe I should have titled this page Title of titles to keep the spirit on.

In that vein, I just introduced the term ‘punny’, although it is a cliché.

• Pavol Ševera, Some title containing the words “homotopy” and “symplectic”, e.g. this one, arXiv/math.SG/0105080

• A. Grothendieck, Hodge’s general conjecture is false for trivial reasons, Topology 8: 299–303 (1969).

• Arne Strøm, The homotopy category is a homotopy category, Arch. Math. (Basel) 23 (1972), 435–441 pdf

• V. A. Hinich, V. V. Schechtman, On homotopy limit of homotopy algebras, $K$-theory, arithmetic and geometry (Moscow, 1984–1986), 240–264, Lecture Notes in Math., 1289, Springer, Berlin, 1987.

• V. Hinich, Homological algebra of homotopy algebras, Comm. Algebra 25 (1997), no. 10, 3291–3323.

• C. Rezk, A model for the homotopy theory of homotopy theories, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 353 (2001), no. 3, 973–1007, doi.

• J. Bergner, Three models for the homotopy theory of homotopy theories,

• P. Balmer, G. Tabuada, The Mother of all isomorphism conjectures via DG categories and derivators, arXiv:0810.2099

• J. P. Serre, Gèbres (in French; Engl. Gebras) Enseign. Math. (2) 39 (1993), no. 1-2, 33–85.

• Sasha Beilinson, Determinant gerbils, a talk at MPI Bonn (a gerbil is a kind of animal, the pun is on gerbes)

• Micah Goldblum, Jonas Geiping, Avi Schwarzschild, Michael Moeller, Tom Godstein, Truth or backpropaganda? An empirical investigation of deep learning theory, arxiv:/1910.00359 accepted conference paper at ICLR 2020 (the notion and the word formation of “backpropaganda” are akin to the central ingredient of the modern “deep learning” algorithms, backpropagation)

Several more candidates of similar character are listed in the responses to MO question most-memorable-titles. See also MathOverflow parodies-of-abstruse-mathematical-writing.

This one is a little bit out of the category but has a point:

• Martin A. Schwartz, The importance of stupidity in scientific research (essay) Journal of Cell Science 2008 121: 1771 doi
category: reference

Last revised on January 27, 2020 at 11:26:51. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.