Pure mathemathics: authors appearing in alphabetic order So the title of the question is quite broad, I've seen a few of questions in the site regarding this particular topic (quite a few actually, so let me know if this is somehow a duplicate).
My problem is the following, I am working on my PhD thesis, and so far me and my supervisor have collaborated in a few articles (that somehow constitute the body of my thesis). Right now I am working on a particular article (on which I've made all the work). The fact is that my supervisor, and apparently all the members of my faculty tend to put authors in alphabetic order. The fact is that my last-name starts with a &quot;T&quot; so by using their logic I will almost surely  end-up being the second\third author.
I don't feel this is actually fair, since after some search online I've seen that in general the order of the authors reflects somehow how much work was done by each one. So it seems strange for me to be like &quot;coauthoring&quot; my own PhD thesis.
What should I do? I don't want to appear pretentious, or rude in front of my supervisor, but I don't think it's fair for me either.
Do you have some advice on what to do?
In case it's relevant my field of research is pure math.
The convention in pure math is to list authors in alphabetical order.
Since this is generally known inside pure math, readers will not draw any conclusions from the author order about the relative importance of contributions. In fact, my impression is that most pure mathematicians prefer to avoid discussion of relative importance of contributions altogether, with the exception of occassionally giving more credit to their coauthors in slightly informal settings.
[As a side note, Author contribution statements seem to be unfeasible for widespread use in math. While there are collaborations where X proved Theorem 1 and Y proved Theorem 2, it is in my experience far more common that X and Y talked repeatedly over a long period of time, and at some point the proofs materialized.]
Admittedly, being listed first will mean being noticed a little bit more. However, in line with the convention about author order, the &quot;X et al&quot;-style is typically avoided. It seems far more common to refer to unwieldly large groups of authors by initials (eg GKSSW proved that...).
The place where your advisor is supposed to express how overwhelming your contributions were is in your letters of recommendation.
That said, in pure math it is also convention that merely advising a student does not establish authorship. It is even a common sentiment that advisors should be very reluctant in appearing as a coauthor on an advisor/student paper.