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The Shortest Papers Ever Published (2016)
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoReminds me of http://www.tinytocs.org http://www.tinytocs.org, computer science papers whose bodies must be 140 characters or less.
- a_c 9y agotwitter henceforth
- isaaclyman 9y agoHuh.
- QAPereo 9y agoIf https://m.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/best-spartan-laconic-phrases-boldest-wittiest-lines-ever-recorded.html https://m.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/best-spartan...
- jwilk 9y agoNon-mobile link: http://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/best-spartan-laconic-phrases-boldest-wittiest-lines-ever-recorded.html http://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/best-sparta...
- kbutler 9y agoAh.
- satyajeet23 9y agoExcellent.
- l0b0 9y agoQED.
- EGreg 9y agoDucks swim.
- linux2647 9y ago
- BenjiWiebe 9y agoCool!
- tacon 9y agoOne of the shortest papers ever, or maybe the longest: https://johnmorton1000.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/1976-recursive.pdf https://johnmorton1000.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/1976-recu...
- mygo 9y agoIf you want to see what he did there, read again from the start of this sentence.
- andy-wu 9y agoThere's an excellent Numberphile on this topic, most of the papers in the post are mentioned in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvvkJT8myeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvvkJT8myeI
- jerf 9y agoIn my opinion, it is clear the author simply copied that video, because not only is it the exact same set of papers, if memory serves (as I watched it only last week), it is in the exact same order, which is particularly determinative. Citation would be appropriate at the very least.
- kendallpark 9y agoThis guy solved two open problems in mathematics because he mistook them for a homework assignment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig#Mathematical_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig#Mathematical_st... "A year later, when I began to worry about a thesis topic, Neyman just shrugged and told me to wrap the two problems in a binder and he would accept them as my thesis." Each paper was seven pages, which would make a fourteen page thesis.
- stochastic_monk 9y agoVery, cool! In fact, a paper which solved one of these problems [1] is precisely 7 pages. Additionally, it contains the footnote: "The main results of this paper were obtained by the authors independently of each other using entirely different methods." [1] https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoms/1177729695 https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoms/1177729695
- whyenot 9y agoMy Favorite is Dan Janzen's paper "Yes?" that was published in Biotropica in 1978. Here it is in full: Yes? No. Acknowledgments: This study was supported by NSF DEB77-04889, and grew out of discussion with the Society for Historical Orations on Theory. Daniel H. Janzen Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA
- xtreme 9y agoI want to know what the peer reviews looked like.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lallysingh 9y agoOK?
- mygo 9y ago"True"
- xelxebar 9y agoThis is taking Betteridge's Law of Headlines a bit far... I just had to look this one up though, so for posterity: https://doi.org/10.2307/2387687 https://doi.org/10.2307/2387687.
- yosyp 9y agoLink to the paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2387687 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2387687
- johnjwang 9y agoAlthough these short papers are fun, I think the most interesting papers are those that are both important and concise. One of my favorite examples is Josh Nash's proof of the existence of Nash Equilibria (which is a foundational concept in game theory and arguably won Nash a Nobel): http://www.pnas.org/content/36/1/48.full http://www.pnas.org/content/36/1/48.full It's less than a full page in the original journal.
- alvis 9y agoI love this example which shows how a "novel" publication can be that simple and beautiful.
- ziotom78 9y agoAgreed. In a few days I'm supposed to give a lecture about how to write great scientific papers. I wasn't aware of this paper (I'm aphysicist, not a mathematician), but nevertheless I'm going to discuss it with the class, its conciseness is exemplary! Thanks a lot!
- purelitmass 9y agoCan you post your presentation here?? I would be interested to see it.
- ziotom78 9y agoI would be happy to put it on slideshare, but it's going to be written in italian… Be sure to check this video, as it is very good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3dkRsTqdDA&index=38&list=FLBZKlP8DEZVtccs4NTezZ_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3dkRsTqdDA&index=38&list=FL...
- tinyrick2 9y agoHis Ph.D. thesis is also relatively short (just 28 pages): https://rbsc.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/Non-Cooperative_Games_Nash.pdf https://rbsc.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/Non-Cooperati...
- sebleon 9y agoThis reminds me of 'El Dinosaurio,' the shortest Spanish narrative: "Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí." English: "When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there."
- zoul 9y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fiction
- personlurking 9y agoI like the idea of flash non-fiction, but I never seem able to find much about it. Not one-liners, rather in the 3-5 paragraph range, which might be understood as being an article (ex. newspaper/magazine), only articles are usually longer. I'd love to find an example of a media outlet that does such a thing, albeit with mid/high-brow content.
- cousin_it 9y agohttp://sixsentences.blogspot.ch/ http://sixsentences.blogspot.ch/ is pretty good sometimes.
- thriftwy 9y agoI once had a directory with huge number of fiction books, and I've sorted it by size asc. Most of the first few dozens of entries were amusing.
- juliendorra 9y ago365 tomorrows might be the right length for you: https://365tomorrows.com/ https://365tomorrows.com/ (only science fiction)
- ManuelKiessling 9y agoWhich in turn reminds me of Hemingway's shortest short story: 'For sale: baby shoes, never worn.'
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- 1ris 9y ago"The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer's block”1" by Dennis Upper has a total of zero words. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/
- ehsankia 9y agoDid you read the whole article? This example and a couple other "empty page" examples are given lower down in the list.
- jwilk 9y agoFrom the HN guidelines: Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
- kwhitefoot 9y ago> Please don't insinuate He or she didn't. He or she was quite direct. See https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/insinuate https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/insinuate. If anything, it is you who are insinuating that the commenter did not read the HN guidelines. The guidelines misuse the word 'insinuate' to mean 'say or insinuate' or possibly 'accuse'.
- ehsankia 9y agoYou are correct, thank you for pointing it out, I'll try to be more conscious about it in the future :)
- sunstone 9y agoE=mc^2 . Thank you and good night.
- dotancohen 9y agoThough an interesting article, it should be noted that the article reproduces and makes available copyrighted - and expensive - materials. Case in point, a $40 PDF that was converted to a .png and displayed on the site: https://cdn.paperpile.com/blog/files/Goldberg-2014 https://cdn.paperpile.com/blog/files/Goldberg-2014.
- pmalynin 9y agoUh http://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/files/2014/06/nchem_-Chemical-Free.pdf http://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/files/2014/06/nc... http://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/2014/06/a-chemical-free-paper.html http://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/2014/06/a-chemic...
- dotancohen 9y agoTo be fair, I should note that those publications published only the abstract and eliminated the actual research results. (lrf v'z wbxvat)
- jahsjahs 9y agoGareth Evans' 1978 1-pager "Can There Be Vague Objects?" is notable both for its brevity, and for its significance. https://academic.oup.com/analysis/article-abstract/38/4/208/131350?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://academic.oup.com/analysis/article-abstract/38/4/208/...
- 2sk21 9y agoA bit tangential but amusing: my PhD dissertation was 51 pages, all math. One of my committee members approved of the work but wanted the dissertation to be bulked up with a program listing- thankfully my advisor firmly rejected this suggestion :-)
- yeukhon 9y agoWhat’s purpose? Seriously?
- folli 9y agoWhat's ironic in itself is that the mentioned paper ("A comprehensive overview of chemical-free consumer products", published by Wiley; i.e. an empty page) costs $38 to download as PDF: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/ciuz.201600750/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/ciuz.2016007... This makes it the most expensive piece of literature (cost per word) that I know of.
- visarga 9y agoThose journals got to recoup their expenses and hard work. /s
- hateduser2 9y agoI suppose they just set a default price for all papers, and manually adjust others or something like that? I’m sure it’s not as silly as it seems right
- visarga 9y agoI'm sure they could price by number of pages.
- Vinnl 9y agoUnfortunately, most scientific and scholarly literature is among the most expensive pieces of literature.
- nesyt 9y agoOne of my favorite papers is a pretty short but famous one: Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~kleinsch/Gettier.pdf http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~kleinsch/Gettier.pdf
- leephillips 9y agoHow bizarre is it that I've read this paper before. I think it's provocative, but, this not being my field, I don't know what effect it had.
- bhritchie 9y agoIt's one of the most influential papers in epistemology. The paper gave rise to the notion of the "Gettier problem" for the otherwise appealing view that knowledge is justified true belief. A great deal of epistemology since can be understood as trying to figure out what to add to the "justified true belief" theory to get around Gettier-style objections. Also interesting, it seems to have been basically the only thing he published, and he published it mainly because he had to publish something.
- blauditore 9y agoI fail to understand how the content in the Soifer paper (triangles) answers its title question. So yes, some explanation would have been necessary in my opinion.
- shmageggy 9y agoThat's the thing, most of these are actually pretty bad papers. Their editors were right, it would have been improved with at least a couple of sentences of background info or explanation. For example, why is that problem even an interesting one to ask? Should we expect the answer to the titular question to be no? Is there anything particularly novel or interesting about the existence proof they've provided that could maybe be applied to other problems? And so on.
- tgb 9y agoI disagree: the paper is clearly not trying to answer it's titular question, in fact it is justifying why that question is interesting to ask. In particular, it demonstrates that the answer to the obvious other question to ask (with n+2 instead of n+1) is yes and clearly if you altered the question the other direction (with n instead of n+1), then the answer is no. This immediately makes me find the question compelling. Papers motivating problems are, frankly, quite important and should be done more often.
- blauditore 9y agoWell, that way around it makes sense. But what you wrote here could have been written in the paper, so people like me would have understood it as well.
- tgb 9y agoYeah, it's definitely arguable. They clearly were trying to be cute with the paper. Though note that the published version of the paper was slightly longer (but without really enhancing its clarity).
- mzl 9y agoA nice example of short papers that introduced very important concepts are C.A.R. Hoarse publications on the partition and quicksort algorithms in 1961: * https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=366622.366644 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=366622.366644 * https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=366642 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=366642
- danohu 9y agoHow about the most silent lecture? "Cole’s lecture was different. He did not speak a single word. He simply went to the board, and began to calculate. On one side of the board, he calculated 267 – 1 = 147,573,952,589,676,412,927 by hand. Then he went to the other side of the board and worked out the product of 193,707,721 and 761,838,257,287, the factors of 147,573,952,589,676,412,927. After spending the silent hour working out the calculations, Cole simply turned around and went back to his seat, completely silent! The audience erupted into a standing ovation." https://musingsonmath.com/2012/10/31/one-long-multiplication-problem-revisited/ https://musingsonmath.com/2012/10/31/one-long-multiplication...
- vadimberman 9y agoWas the superluminal neutrino paper still relevant after they discovered it was an error? Or it's something completely different?
- eru 9y agoNegative results are pretty useful. Eg the next time someone comes across a similar measurement, they can take that paper for some inspiration of a list of things to check.
- ar-jan 9y agoA more interesting zero-word article than the writer's block one is "On Nonrecoverable Deletion in Syntax" (1972) [0] 0: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BmLQjz0CMAA-l28.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BmLQjz0CMAA-l28.jpg:large
- purelitmass 9y agoHas anyone made a self referential paper on recursion? That would tickle me pink.
- supermdguy 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15737998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15737998
- xbryanx 9y agoReminds me of the classic, "The Effects of Peanut Butter on the Rotation of the Earth" from the Annals of Improbable Research. https://www.improbable.com/airchives/classical/articles/peanut_butter_rotation.html https://www.improbable.com/airchives/classical/articles/pean...
- dsacco 9y agoOn a related note, I'm fond of this Mathoverflow answer, "Which math paper maximizes the ratio (importance)/(length)?"[1] Highlights include: 1. A one-sentence proof published in American Mathematical Monthly that costs $19 to download on JSTOR, 2. The 8-page paper that introduced ζ (zeta) notation, two proofs of the ζ(s) L-function, several new methods in analytic and number theory, and (most famously) the Riemann Hypothesis, 3. Lebesque's paper introducing modern measure theory, 4. Elkies' paper proving the (titular) existence of infinitely many supersingular primes for every elliptic curve defined on the rationals. It seems it was a bit easier to publish short, dense material in the 20th century :) _________________________________ 1. https://mathoverflow.net/questions/7330/which-math-paper-maximizes-the-ratio-importance-length https://mathoverflow.net/questions/7330/which-math-paper-max...
- lou1306 9y agoAnother short, important paper: E. W. Dijkstra, “Solution of a problem in concurrent programming control,” Commun. ACM, vol. 8, no. 9, p. 569, Sep. 1965. Just one page, no references (understandable, since it is one of the very first papers on concurrent algorithms), proposes a mechanism for mutual exclusion between N processes.
- stevefan1999 9y agoIs there any paper that can be both short, concise and deep?