Titles for math papers

[Yollia]

Titles for math papers get right to the point. They describe the main result so people (or at least mathematicians) who glance at them will care enough to exert the effort to read them.

These titles sound horrific to non-mathematicians. Here are titles for some potential papers I'm working on:

"A Littlewood-Richardson rule for non-maximal Grassmannians of types B and C"

"A Littlewood-Richardson rule for double Schubert polynomials with application to the cohomology of the flag manifold"

"A Littlewood-Richardson rule for factorial P- and Q- polynomials and a combinatorial formula for the T-equivariant cohomology of Lagrangian and odd orthogonal Grassmannians"

"Fiber-graded partially ordered sets and associated polynomials"

which, if all goes well, could turn into...

"A general Littlewood-Richardson rule for polynomials associated to fiber-graded partially ordered sets"

...which would solve dozens of problems that have plagued algebraic combinatorists since the early 70's, here's to hoping!

...by the way, can you guess what my specialty is?

[Goretawn]

Underwater basketweaving.

[NocturnalRob]

Gloryhole Installation

[waywardgs]

Little Richard doesn't live by your rules.

[Euler]

what means "Grassmanians?" Is this all topolgy stuff?

When you get famous, can I co-publish with you? I want an Erdos number but am too stupid to earn one on my own.

[Yollia]

Grassmannians show up in topology and algebraic geometry. But I do mostly algebraic combinatorics. It all ends up being related anyway.

I'd write a paper with you, but it's probably best you get a PhD first due to the snobbery that is the academic community. I might be ostracized if I write a paper with a mere mortal.

[Yollia]

For the guess of my specialty I expected "Littlewood-Richardson rules", because 'Littlewood-Richardson rule' is in the title of every potential paper.

[Clove]

It's Turtles All the Way to the Bottom.

[The Ponzzz]

Underwater basketweaving.

Haha, I didn't realize other people used this joke course name!

[Yollia]

Potential title for my doctoral dissertation: Universal Everything Polynomials of Doom. Comments?

[Martaigne]

It's Turtles All the Way to the Bottom.

I like turtles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMNry4PE93Y

[Bhuryn]

The wishywashy world of numbers and how they relate to hills.

[ElvenFury]

Potential title for my doctoral dissertation: Universal Everything Polynomials of Doom. Comments?

I'd like to submit: The Indirectly Proportionate Relationship Between Math Reading and My Sex Life

[Yollia]

I assume you mean inversely proportionate, and that's a thesis I'd refute.

[Bobmuhthol]

Thank God for applying math to another field and totally avoiding this mess.

[Yollia]

I'm not one of those people who thinks applied math is "selling out" or "impure", but I will say that it's usually not my thing. It's common, though, that very interesting pure mathematics (pure in the sense of no intended application in mind) stems from applications.

Best example I know of: representation theory. Physicists wanted to know how to find matrices that treated vectors the way they wanted them to. My friend is a physics grad student, he says: "Well there are a bunch of representations of SU(2), there's 2x2 matrices, 3x3 matrices..."

Most physicists are understandably interested only in low-dimensional (2,3,4) representations. In the current setting of representation theory, that's a very primitive way of looking at it. Mathematicians have instead found ALL (finite-dimensional) representations of SU(2), and they aren't "matrices", they're differentiable homomorphisms into the general linear group. They can be thought of as matrices, sure, but you have to pick a basis for that. Modern representation theory is about as pure as math gets.

[Clove]

I like turtles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMNry4PE93YMe too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B-K4NGo2HE

[phantasm]

Any updates on new math to describe quantum gravity would be appreciated.

[Yollia]

First hurdle in my thesis: find conditions that ensure the existence of my Universal Everything Polynomials of Doom. This is going to require a bit of lazing about before I get anywhere, I imagine.

[Euler]

First hurdle in my thesis: find conditions that ensure the existence of my Universal Everything Polynomials of Doom. This is going to require a bit of lazing about before I get anywhere, I imagine.

Either (1)there are Universal Everything Polynomials of Doom or (2) there are not.

If 1, QED

If 2 I am unemployable.


I can have co-author now?

[Yollia]

Either (1)there are Universal Everything Polynomials of Doom or (2) there are not.

It's slightly more complicated than that. For S_{\infty}, there are double Schubert polynomials. For the partition lattice, there are factorial Schur poylnomials, or Macdonald polynomials, or Jack polynomials. For the lattice of strict partitions, there are factorial P- and Q- polynomials.

Those are some special cases of my Universal Everything Polynomials of Doom that are already named after other people. It's very nice that I have a uniform way of defining them, but it would be nice to get some new stuff.

[Euler]

never use two words when one ...