The order in which the authors of an academic paper are listed is a perpetual source of trouble, partly since the approved order various between disciplines, so the contribution of authors of interdisciplinary papers is likely to be misunderstood.
In some areas, authors are ordered by the relative importance of their contributions. This leads to comparing apples and chalk: how do you rate the person who had the idea against the student who did all the hard work carrying it out?
Sometimes the order has a coded significance known only to insiders, e.g. the last-named author is the director of the lab. (If you do this, take care: remember what happened to Elena Ceaucescu, director of the Romanian chemistry institute, and incidentally wife of the dictator of Romania.)
In mathematics we almost always use alphabetical order. But this is tough on people whose name begins with a letter late in the alphabet. My former colleague Rob Wilson lists the authors of the Online Atlas of Finite Group Representations in reverse alphabetical order, so that he can be first for a change.
Now, in a recent arXiv preprint (2304.01393), Erik and Martin Demaine discuss a solution to this problem: superimpose the authors’ names!
Read their paper: it gives a beautiful account of the philosophy and mechanism of their method, including LaTeX code to format a BibTeX entry in this way.
Do take a look.
Peter Cameron's Blog 
In our university, first authors takes the highest point, followed by the second, then the third and so on. I thought that is applicable everywhere.
I wonder if we could put them in a circle? Or on the vertices of a graph (making sure the symmetry group of the graph is transitive of course, so no vertex can be distinguished as special). Of course, putting the graph on paper will end up with some authors being higher / lefter.
Indeed, the circle idea is used in the paper. Perhaps if I ever write another 7-author paper I will use the Fano plane…
I was a mathematician in a computer science department. Most of my colleagues had a policy of listing student co-authors first. I tended to follow this custom for CS-related papers. For math papers, almost always listed authors in alphabetical order.
Then there is https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.14339, a paper by three authors all named Sam, and whose surnames begin with the letters S, A, M. So they put them in that order, with the disclaimer that “The ordering of the authors is done for purely aesthetic reasons”….
I am last author on quite a few papers including three ABC papers in which I am the only common author. (This doesn’t mean I am director of the lab!)
There is also the famous Alpher-Bethe-Gamov paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93Gamow_paper
This caused some headaches for Ralph Alpher. Gamov (the PhD supervisor of Alpher) added Bethe as a joke, diluting the groundbreaking contributions by Alpher.