Random baffling math paper title generator

As requested by BB reader Arborman on the comment thread for "Math papers with complicated, humbling titles," here is a random baffling math paper title generator. Refresh the page for a new periodical.

• [endymion]

  This is just boingboing readers, who generally pride themselves on being technically educated and informed, turning on their own kind. What Kundera calls being “the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers”.

  For shame.

  • [Jonathan Badger]

    Exactly. It’s funny when somebody makes a postmodern title generator, because the whole point is that the random titles are no more meaningless than what people like Deleuze wrote in complete seriousness. But math and science use “funny” jargon for legitimate communication purposes — not to bamboozle.

  • [Ambiguity]

    For shame.

    No. For fun!

• [YarbroughFair]

  You all have short memories; we already did this on BoingBoing using Google Scribe: I started with the word “covariance’s” and Google Scribe made multiple suggestions. Amazingly, math related subjects were offered:

  Covariance’s Between Traits and Heliotypes When Linked With Disequilibrium Mapping.

  http://scribe.googlelabs.com/

• [Xenu]

  Reminds me of SciGen, the program that generates gibberish computer science papers. It even spits out LaTeX with fancy charts and graphs.

  http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

• [foxtails]

  Imagine the mathematicians who Google for an obscure concept and find this page at the top of their search results, only to become frustrated.

• [Rob Beschizza]

  I’m sorry that some of you are too concrete-minded to see that this isn’t the same joke as Sokal/Pomo autogeneration. If you think this is an attack on mathematics or the authors of papers archived at Cornell (in the way that pomo generators carry implied attacks on postmodernism and postmodernists), you’re as dense as an omniderivative Millard-Arendt complex plane eigenpostulate.

  • [endymion]

    No, I don’t think it’s an attack on mathematics or the papers’ authors. I just think it’s cheap. Notice that when math jokes are really funny (like the xkcd example offered above), the authors get the math, and the substance of the math is part of the joke. This is true even for self-deprecating mathematical jokes.

• [YarbroughFair]

  It’s so nice to see all you mathletes take a break and visit BoingBoing.

• [Ambiguity]

  “Upper bounds for the parabolic Anderson model.”

  I actually found an illustration for that.

• [fnc]

  “Instability of repulsive point processes.”

  Oh god, it’s prom night all over again.

• [Anonymous]

  I’ve seen a few of these on wikipedia. I’ve found trying to review even simple math concepts on wikipedia is hell, because usually I only need to follow 1-2 links to get to something I’ve never heard of and wouldn’t understand without years of grad school math.

• [PaulR]

  Obligatory XKCD strip requiring an hour and a half of research, just to get the punch line:
  http://xkcd.com/207/

  Third frame down…

  Happy hunting.

• [Anonymous]

  The intricacies of protein folding are a real bitch too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_value_analysis

• [Anonymous]

  “On the partial Ricci curvature of the Electromagnetic S-Wave with the Thin Metal Film.”

  Now I know how magnets work… almost.
  (the term “electromagnetic” always seems to appear along with the phrase “thin metal film”. Some bias in the algorithm?)

• [JoshuaZ]

  This is great. As a math grad student I find this deeply amusing. Trying to interpret some of these is fun. Right now my list includes “Fake lifting of squares” which I’m trying to figure out a reasonable meaning for. One can talk about lifting of polynomials in general (from a mod p^n to mod p^(n+1)) but I’m not sure what fake lifting would entail.

  Another one of the title “Fast Grobner Basis Computation and function spaces” sounds highly reasonable.

• [Rob Beschizza]

  I’m sorry, endymion. I thought when you said ‘turning on their own kind’ you actually meant that!

  The Kundera quote, which refers to intelligent people lured by Nazism and Stalinism into destroying their own freedoms, is a particularly bizarre remark. Do you really expect to be taken seriously? Because you are taking this too seriously.

• [TooGoodToCheck]

  Pfaffian! I realize it’s actually not one of the more baffling math things you’re going to encounter, but I love the way the word looks.

  Pfaffian

• [Donald Petersen]

  Like a Monday-Mean Monkey pounding his Underwood, you now run the risk of publishing the Grand Unified Theory, only to see all chance of remuneration and fame slip through your fingers when some fool refreshes.

• [Avram / Moderator]

  “The Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Parameterization of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds”

  • [Vorn]

    It stinks.

  • [shash]

    Bozhe Moi!

  • [Anonymous]

    AVRAM:

    I should probably nominate myself as the annoying person who points out that Tom Lehrer’s paper title from Plagiarize does, in fact, make perfect sense (though it’s a bit vague).

• [Anonymous]

  There would be a generator like this for philosophy as well.

• [sloverlord]

  If you do have a math background, you can still have fun trying to make these make sense. For example, you could conceivably have a Non-zero Sum Stochastic Differential Game on a Higher-Dimensional Covariance Matrix. I can’t imagine it being a whole lot of fun, but with enough mental gymnastics you could do it.

• [Anonymous]

  and darn how lovely they look in hoefler.

  .~.

• [Anonymous]

  Where’s the Greek?

• [Rob Beschizza]

  “Fake lifting of squares” is clearly the refutation of an awful study (into the mind-control effects of non-ionising radiation), whose fraudulent authors scurrilously deployed a topological analysis to give a false impression of electromagnetic effects over distance.

• [cservant]

  “Application of small-scale fading envelopes”.

  Oh man small-scaling fading envelopes!

• [Anonymous]

  “On the partial Ricci curvature of the Electromagnetic S-Wave with the Thin Metal Film.”
  Now I know how magnets work… almost.

  Other titles that are interesting, listed by category:
  1. True Facts:
  “Uniform convergence of zeta-functions.”
  “On the Existence of fractal curves.”
  2. Redundant Redundancies:
  “Norms of Higher Sobolev Norms.”
  “Branched covers of Branching Brownian Motion.”
  3. That’s What She Proved:
  “Convergence for i.i.d. Gaussian assets.”
  “The boundedness for stiff kinetic equations.”
  “Sets and an explicit description in dimension three.”

• [Donald Petersen]

  “Mixed integer programming for the resolution of the secular evolution of the planar Sun-Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus system.”

  It is, in fact, full of stars.

• [Anonymous]

  “The Microscopic Origin of the wave equation in arbitrary dimensions.”

  This sounds like a genuinely interesting paper; presumably it generalises Feynman’s Checkerboad

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_checkerboard

• [Anonymous]

  I am a professional mathematician, and I find these pretty amusing. The most amusing thing about them is how many could actually be real papers.

  • [knappa]

    I know, I got:
    “The Tutte Polynomial of prime knots up to arc index 11.”
    Since the Tutte polynomial (apparently) specializes to the Jones polynomial, it might even be interesting.

• [AnthonyC]

  Yes, but can I cut them into pieces and end up with 2 equally baffling titles?