In arithmetic geometry, the CoxâZucker machine is an algorithm created by David A. Cox and Steven Zucker. This algorithm determines whether a given set of sections[ further explanation needed] provides a basis (up to torsion) for the MordellâWeil group of an elliptic surface E â S, where S is isomorphic to the projective line. [1]
The algorithm was first published in the 1979 article "Intersection numbers of sections of elliptic surfaces" by Cox and Zucker [2] and was later named the "CoxâZucker machine" by Charles Schwartz in 1984. [1]
The name sounds similar to the obscenity " cocksucker". This was a deliberate choice by Cox and Zucker, who, as first-year graduate students at Princeton University in 1970, conceived of the idea of coauthoring a paper for the express purpose of enabling this joke. They followed through on it five years later, as members of the faculty at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. [3] As Cox explained in a memorial tribute to Zucker in Notices of the American Mathematical Society in 2021: "A few weeks after we met, we realized that we had to write a joint paper because the combination of our last names, in the usual alphabetical order, is remarkably obscene." [3]
In arithmetic geometry, the CoxâZucker machine is an algorithm created by David A. Cox and Steven Zucker. This algorithm determines whether a given set of sections[ further explanation needed] provides a basis (up to torsion) for the MordellâWeil group of an elliptic surface E â S, where S is isomorphic to the projective line. [1]
The algorithm was first published in the 1979 article "Intersection numbers of sections of elliptic surfaces" by Cox and Zucker [2] and was later named the "CoxâZucker machine" by Charles Schwartz in 1984. [1]
The name sounds similar to the obscenity " cocksucker". This was a deliberate choice by Cox and Zucker, who, as first-year graduate students at Princeton University in 1970, conceived of the idea of coauthoring a paper for the express purpose of enabling this joke. They followed through on it five years later, as members of the faculty at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. [3] As Cox explained in a memorial tribute to Zucker in Notices of the American Mathematical Society in 2021: "A few weeks after we met, we realized that we had to write a joint paper because the combination of our last names, in the usual alphabetical order, is remarkably obscene." [3]