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A Series of Unfortunate Formulas
Oct. 5th, 2008 12:31 amSome authors like to give their papers short and relatively useless titles, for example "On a conjecture of Vrshsczenskiy". Other authors prefer titles which are equally uninformative but aim to entertain
the reader, like "Hodge-Star Wars". In the former case, the reader is puzzled, in the latter case he might be amused, but in both cases he is tempted to skim at least the first couple of pages. Yet a third group of authors tries to make their titles as informative as possible, even if it means scaring away most readers. We belong to this third category, and our title is not intended to amuse but to warn the person thinking about printing it out that upon opening it he will plunge into a dark and seemingly unending stream of deeply disturbing formulas and arguments which will cause him many hours of misery and despair. In fact, the reader would do much better if he curled up with a copy of J. Conway's book "On Numbers and Games", or even Belinson and Drinfeld's book "Chiral algebras". There he would find such pleasing and wholesome words as "set", "real number", "sheaf", "category" and "gerbe", rather than the ill-defined and anxiety-causing words and expressions such as "path-integral", "action", "BRST transformation", "ghost number", "quantization of a symmetric monoidal category", or "perturbative expansion of a correlator of topological observables".
(after Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events").
the reader, like "Hodge-Star Wars". In the former case, the reader is puzzled, in the latter case he might be amused, but in both cases he is tempted to skim at least the first couple of pages. Yet a third group of authors tries to make their titles as informative as possible, even if it means scaring away most readers. We belong to this third category, and our title is not intended to amuse but to warn the person thinking about printing it out that upon opening it he will plunge into a dark and seemingly unending stream of deeply disturbing formulas and arguments which will cause him many hours of misery and despair. In fact, the reader would do much better if he curled up with a copy of J. Conway's book "On Numbers and Games", or even Belinson and Drinfeld's book "Chiral algebras". There he would find such pleasing and wholesome words as "set", "real number", "sheaf", "category" and "gerbe", rather than the ill-defined and anxiety-causing words and expressions such as "path-integral", "action", "BRST transformation", "ghost number", "quantization of a symmetric monoidal category", or "perturbative expansion of a correlator of topological observables".
(after Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events").
