One small note on the paper itself. I love that the paper's author are in alphabetical orders, without any stupid jostling over first/last authorship.
I think that's fantastic and wish academia went that way too (yeah right).
I think that's fantastic and wish academia went that way too (yeah right).
From the AMS statement on The Culture of Research and Scholarship in Mathematics: "For this reason, mathematicians traditionally list authors on joint papers in alphabetical order. An analysis of journal articles with at least one U.S. based author shows that nearly half were jointly authored. Of these, more than 75% listed the authors in alphabetical order. In pure mathematics, nearly all joint papers (over 90%) list authors alphabetically."
http://www.ams.org/profession/leaders/culture/CultureStateme...
Or use a pseudonym.
The digraph "aa" is an archaic representation of the modern character "å", the last letter of the Norwegian and Danish alphabets, and should be sorted accordingly.
(I can actually answer my own question to some degree: the "alphabetical authors" convention is also the norm in my own field of high energy physics. Only after I finally landed a tenure-track job and served on another search committee did I realize that folks from other fields of physics would see my lack of first-author publications as a black mark. But in principle, among those who know the convention, order ought to be unimportant, shouldn't it?)
Also consider that a single "order" might not make any sense. How do you determine if somebody "contributed" more than anybody else?
Also, at CERN, with papers with 1000+ authors, any chance of picking the 'right' name from the list approaches zero, anyways. Such papers typically list a "corresponding author" to whom to send inquiries.
Alphabetic order also gave us the fun Google search phrase "Does G. Aad exist?" (Gives a link to https://jeffollerton.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/does-gaad-exis..., but Google also suggests a correction to your "typo")