Cox–Zucker machine

The Cox–Zucker machine is an algorithm created by David A. Cox and Steven Zucker. This algorithm determines whether a given set of sections provides a basis (up to torsion) for the Mordell–Weil group of an elliptic surface E → 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 "Cox–Zucker machine" by Charles Schwartz in 1984.[1] The name sounds similar to the obscenity "cock sucker".

This was a deliberate move by Cox and Zucker, who conceived of the idea of coauthoring a paper as graduate students at Princeton for the express purpose of enabling this joke, a joke they followed through on while professors at Rutgers five years later.[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]