it's common in math/cs theory papers to have the order of authors be alphabetical rather than in descending order of contribution.
Good, but that can also be noted in a subtitle right below the authors (I've seen this in papers myself!)
The paper is not targeted at laymen, but other members of the research community, who are aware of the author ordering convention.
I wonder if there's a significant nominative determinism effect--
One might expect some of the most prominent people in math and cs theory to have names like Aaronson and Baez...
It would be most fair to hash the names first, especially for this paper
I suppose then the next question will be which author gets to choose the hash function..
They all pick one, results are XORred together.
The classiest person I ever knew placed me before him on a paper just to be nice. Not only was he responsible for getting the grants funding our research, but the heft of both the theoretical and paper authorship work. I'm no longer in R&D and/or academia, but at that point I decided to do the same for someone if I ever have the opportunity to write a noteworthy paper with someone who is my junior.
The best papers have "contribution statements" which clearly lays out who did what.
Yeah, seems a bit ridiculous that he made the discovery and didn't get first authorship.
Sibling comment mentions this specific field doesn't have author ordering.