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Author names in alphabetical order is pretty ubiquitous in pure mathematics. There are also usually few (1-5) authors on a paper, and some people who contribute a small amount to a paper (say, a nicer proof of a lemma) are not listed as an author, but thanked elsewhere in the paper.

I think the reason this works for pure maths and not some other fields is that pure maths is quite “slow”, in that people don’t release papers nearly as frequently as other fields, and the papers tend to be longer.

My impression is that the order of the authors is extremly important in medical research, very important in releated fields like biochemistry and molecular biology and still quite important in bioinformatics, while in fields like mathematics and computer science the autors can decide to list the authors alphabetically. This correlates quite nicely with the level of competetiveness in the respecive fields.

It seems somewhat common in cryptography.