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What is the Yellow Cake?
Marc Abrams gets a taste of 'The Yellow Cake', but is none the wiser as to what it means
Tuesday February 10, 2004
The Guardian
What
is the yellow cake, and what makes it yellow rather than merely cake?
"The Yellow Cake" is the title of an article by Andrzej Roslanowski and
Saharon Shelah, published in the Proceedings of the American
Mathematical Society. (It is available online at http://shelah.logic.at/listb.html.)
Investigator Tom Roberts mailed me a copy of it, pointing out that
neither he nor his everyday mathematical colleagues knew what the title
refers to. Nowhere
in its 13 pages does the article explain what it means by "yellow
cake". The words only appear in the title, nowhere else. A
quick sampling of professional mathematicians found that none had
ever heard the phrase "yellow cake" used as a mathematical concept. The
meaning, if there is any meaning, apparently is confined to a very
small, extremely specialised segment of the mathematical community.
Possibly just the authors know, though there seems a good chance that
the editor of Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society has some
inkling. The
paper is almost entirely equations and symbols, with the word "clearly"
here and there. It is the kind of thing that gives non-mathematicians
the willies. Some of the symbols are at least as obscure as the title,
perhaps more so. One agglomeration of squiggles, on the second page,
has the subscript "sweet" tacked onto its lower right edge. One might
infer that yellow cake, whatever it is, is sweet, whatever that is -
but the inference would be pure conjecture. The
same authors once published a 70-page mathematics paper called "Sweet
and Sour and Other Flavours of ccc Forcing Notions," in which "sweet"
is defined in terms of "sweetness," the definition of which is said to
be in yet a different paper. But to most mathematicians sweetness, like
yellow cake, is far from being a household notion. There
is an obvious, simple way to solve the mystery of "The Yellow Cake".
Ask Roslanowski or Shelah. The former is now at the University of
Nebraska, the latter jointly at Rutgers University and the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. But the enjoyment in solving puzzles comes
from actually solving them, not from asking someone else for the
answer. So if you do ask Andrzej Roslanowski or Saharon Shelah to tell
you the secret to "The Yellow Cake", please keep that information to
yourself, unless of course you are the kind of person who enjoys eating
other people's cake or otherwise spoiling their fun. · Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly magazine Annals of Improbable Research (www.improbable.com)," TARGET="_NEW">www.improbable.com), and organiser of the Ig Nobel Prize
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