The other day, in a nice cafe on the boardwalk at Venice beach, I was working with Veselin Filev, a student of mine, on a paper that he would later submit to the arXiv. The end of the year was approaching and I wandered off into some irrelevant anecdote or other (as I am wont to do), explaining to him a bit about little traditions concerning the arXiv, from the “old days”. I mentioned in passing that one last tradition will come to an end because the numbering system for papers will all change sometime this year (apparently the mathematicians are close to producing too many papers in each month – more than the 1000 the system can handle1.)
I explained that in days of yore, some people would try to get the very first paper of the year, so that they would have a rather special number, of the form hep-th/XX01001, where XX denotes the year. By far the coolest of these was snatched by Paul Aspinwall, with his “Compactification, Geometry and Duality: N=2″ set of lecture notes on K3 complactifications. It is of course hep-th/0001001, and in addition to simply looking great2 it is also the first paper on the ArXiv (the hep-th part) for the entire century. I remember him being very pleased to have grabbed that number3.
Since the system will change soon, this will be the last year to get such a number, I mentioned. Anyway, we were trying to get the paper finished so that Veso could submit it before the end of the year. He wanted it to be a 2006 paper for some reason. So we parted, after a long physics conversation on various topics, and each went our separate ways. After a few email exchanges, the paper was completed the next morning.
At some point in the afternoon, I got a text message from Veso. It said “We got hep-th/0701001”. It’s really funny. It seems that he was trying to get a 06 number but had not realized (I’d not really thought about the date either) that the system would by then (Thursday) already be giving out 07 numbers. We got the very last of the first numbers (of the hep-th specific format), if you see what I mean.
So there you have it:
hep-th/0701001
Title: Flavoured Large N Gauge Theory in an External Magnetic FieldAuthors: Veselin G. Filev, Clifford V. Johnson, R. C. Rashkov, K. S.
Viswanathan
-cvj
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1Ahem…. surely the way to fix the problem is to stop producing so many papers, people?! 😉
2Of course, hep-th/0101001, “On the Polarization of Unstable D0-Branes into Non-Commutative Odd Spheres”, by Zach Guralnik and Sanjaye Ramgoolam almost looks as good.
3Bern, Dixon and Kosower got that number for hep-ph, Don Page got it for gr-qc, Lazarian for astro-ph, and so on…
http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.1111
Ned,
Good point. Provided arXiv’s collaborators implement the required software modifications by 2011. I wasn’t so optimistic 🙂
Regards,
“The first paper of the XXI century and third millenium was hep-th/0101001”
I mentioned that paper in the post.
And whether its first or not depends. Sure, yes, we probably started counting years with year 1 (not year 0), and so forth -and so many scientists and others get their knickers in a twist about this all too often- but psychologically and culturally, most people count off decades and centuries differently. 1970 is regarded by most people as being in the 70s not the 60s because of, well, you know… the 7. Same for 1990, etc, and hence in people’s minds 2000 is not part of the 90s, and so not part of the 20th century, but the first of the 21st. We -as people who make numbers our business- can see that it’s *wrong* from the counting perspective… but that’s not the only way to view the world… and it’s just missing the point entirely. We ought to get over it and fight the numeracy battles that really matter.
Cheers,
-cvj
“hep-th/0001001, and in addition to simply looking great2 it is also the first paper on the ArXiv (the hep-th part) for the entire century”
The first paper of the XXI century and third millenium was hep-th/0101001:
On the Polarization of Unstable D0-Branes into Non-Commutative Odd Spheres
Authors: Z. Guralnik, S. Ramgoolam
FYI, library associations keep giving ArXiv founder Paul Ginsparg awards!
(He did after all organize documents to make them accessible later, a core of librarianship.)
More recently the CNI folks (Clifford Lynch et al):
http://www.cni.org/tfms/2006a.spring/plenary.html
Quite some time back, my own Special Libraries Association, Physics/Astro/Math Division honored him:
http://units.sla.org/division/dpam/manual/awards/ginsparg.html
(He was crusty as usual at the presentation as I remember, but still it was fun to hear him speak.)
Ned,
I know. I was just wondering if there might have been value in going along the other path. Not to do with numbers, but to do with the science itself.
Cheers,
-cvj
Clifford,
astro-ph is not astro phenomenology. It is astro-physics – observational and theoretical. And it was close to going over 1000 articles per month too. The numbering scheme should suffice without splitting the field like hep.
Student:
You will need to get 1111.1111 and good luck with that!
I’m planning to get /1111111 the most special number. It’s complexity is the lowest.
Hi Ned!
You know, it occured to me when writing this post that I did not know why there is no astro-th… I can imagine a whole bunch of sorts of papers that would fit into that category quite naturally… theoretical work that is directly applicable to astro/cosmo but not neccessarily related to specific data, etc…… instead, a lot of those papers live in gr-qc, hep-th, and of course astro-ph…. and other categories too…..
Just a random thought….
-cvj
I once went to the trouble to get
astro-ph/0401001.