A Series of Unfortunate Formulas

[leblon]

Some 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").

Comments

[chaource.livejournal.com]

"Hodge-Star Wars Reloaded" will surely attract a larger number of readers than "On semi-lower-upper-abelian continuity of infinitely triangulable Morse sub-varieties" but will these readers stay and read more than a few lines of the abstract unless they are really interested in the actual topic of the paper? Is the entertainment value really so high that people will have a positive impression of "Hodge-Star Wars" even if the paper is vacuous?

[leblon.livejournal.com]

I doubt that authors who give cute titles to their papers actually hope to attract more readers in this way. They might be trying to show that they are not as boring as your average scientist.