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, KK-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)

  • P. Vámos, The missing axiom of matroid theory is lost forever, J. London Math. Soc. 2nd Ser. 18 (3): 403–408 (1978) doi MR 0518224.

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 June 5, 2024 at 13:18:46. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.