Friday, 4 May 2012

soft question - What are some examples of colorful language in serious mathematics papers?

John (Horton) Conway unrelentingly gets away with colorful, even whimsical language in definitions, in explanations, in paper titles, even in some book titles (The Sensual (Quadratic) Form.) Even in SPLAG, there is the following:



"...we earnestly recommend that you use



The Best Method: guess the correct answer, and then justify it." SPLAG, p. 302



On Numbers and Games is just rife with colorful stuff. (I'm surprised no one has pointed out this elephant in the room yet.) The next to last theorem of the book is



THEOREM 99: Any short all-small game G which has atomic weight zero is infinitesimal with respect to (double-up) and dominated by some superstar.



And the last words of the book are famously



"...a certain feeling of incompleteness prompts us to add a final theorem.



THEOREM 100. This is the last theorem in this book.



(The proof is obvious.)" ONAG p. 224

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