(We had found in the previous year that the instructor did not care about teaching, insist on taking class at 8 in the morning and would religiously take attendance for 10 minutes, by the end of the class half the class would be snoring. So there were inquiries: it turned out most of the students cited that they found the title of the book mentioned in the course material attractive which prompted them to enlist. Within a week a record number of them wanted to opt out. Some of us managed to add the name of this book against the fractal geometry course as a course material. Our university used to put out a list of courses (in the good old days) which were going to be offered and students would choose from it. I was an undergraduate then and it had a strange attraction to me, even though I could not figure out anything that was written in it then. I discovered this while randomly browsing through books in the library and got hooked. This is the most unusual title of a book which I have ever come across. Self-similar Geometry through Metric and Measure. These monographs/papers usually turn out to be the authoritative treaties of the topics, with material unforgettable for one working in the field.įractured Fractals And Broken Dreams. The second title sounds fancy (though the article itself is not) and, more importantly, is unpronounceable by me, therefore I have put some stretch of mental effort into memorising it.Īs to the original question-What makes the title of a paper memorable?-, personally, when I look for things to read, my attention tends to be captured by titles that are short and sweet, for instance, Jean-Pierre Serre's Trees, Ken Brown's Buildings. The first title is easy for me to recall whenever I need to refer to the paper. ` The Bilinski Dodecahedron and Assorted Parallelohedra, Zonohedra, Monohedra, Isozonohedra, and Otherhedra'. Geom.: the Goodman-Pollack Festschrift, ed. ` Are your polyhedra the same as my polyhedra?' Discrete and comput. My memory is marked by the titles of two papers by Branko Grünbaum:īranko Grünbaum.

If you are a bigshot, you can get away with pretty much any title!.

Titles that are bold, are usually short, have an element of surprise, but do not depart too much from the truth seems to be more attractive in general.ĥ.101 Mathematical succinctness might appeal to some people-but is perhaps not that memorable for me-so perhaps such titles are attractive, but maybe not memorable.

To reach the broadest audience, attractive titles are good, though mathematicians might sometimes feel irritated by needlessly cute titles.

A title can be attractive even without having memorable material.

A title becomes truly memorable if the accompanying paper had memorable substance.

A title can be memorable, attractive, or even both (to oversimplify a bit).

Here is my summary of the obvious: Amongst the various 'memorable' titles reported, some of the following are true: So, what have I learned from it? A few things at least. The response to this question has been quite huge.

Nineteen dubious ways to compute the exponential of a matrix, by Moler and van Loan.This advice would be very helpful in helping me (and perhaps others) in designing better, more informative titles (not only for papers, but also for example, for MO questions). I was wondering if the MO-users would be willing to share their wisdom with me on what makes the title of a paper memorable for them or perhaps just cite an example of title they find memorable? This view was my motivation for asking this question almost 7 years ago ( wow!), and it remains equally true today (those who subscribe to arXiv feeds, MO feeds, etc., may agree). Schulten's Intro to 3 Manifold Topology - Difficult text, but very good.Given the vast number of new papers / preprints that hit the internet everyday, one factor that may help papers stand out for a broader, though possibly more casual, audience is their title. I have no personal experience with this text. Lickorish - Seems to be a little more sophisticated than the others. Rolfsen - A little dated, but beautiful diagrams and great exercises. Roberts - Very approachable, very Modern, easy to read, fun exercises. If you're completely new to manifolds, Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds is a great short text Milnor's Differential Topology is even shorter! Below is my take on a few texts. I also highly recommend some passing familiarity with homotopies, isotopies, and what have you (basic algebraic topology via Hatcher or Fulton or Bredon etc.) and some differential topology (Milnor or Guellemin-Pollack).

Related to this field is 3-manifold topology, which is also a very interesting subject to read. There are other excellent references such as Rolfsen's Knots and Links, Lickorish's Introduction to Knot Theory, and Adam's Knot Book.

I'm a big fan of Justin Roberts excellent set of notes titled 'knots knotes' which is available on his web page.

Justin roberts knots knotes