I recommend visiting "the morning paper: a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer". It ran from 2014 to February of 2021, covering a pa

I recommend visiting "the morning paper: a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer". It ran from 2014 to February of 2021, covering a paper per week or so. You can read Colyer's analysis first to determine if reading the paper sounds worth your time. There are also various lists of key programming/CS papers. For example, "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic", David Goldberg's 1990 paper, includes various theorem proofs essential to understanding how IEEE floating point is defined.