Well, yes papers do have bugs in them but it takes much more time for people to figure it out. Thats really missing the point of the paper. There are bugs you c

Well, yes papers do have bugs in them but it takes much more time for people to figure it out. Thats really missing the point of the paper. There are bugs you can recover from (typos) and there are bugs that you can't. If you have too many bugs though then academics will be more and more suspicious. The main reason these can remain out in the wild is that there are much fewer eyeballs that look through papers. There are even subtle bugs that pass peer review. Other people have corrected the bugs. Whats even more interesting is that other people were approaching the same problem around the same time * Church with the lambda calculus (with Turing he developed the Church-Turing thesis. * Emil Post with his Post-Turing (note that he had horrible publishing luck, if his luck was better then we would be celebrating 116 years of Post ). Also, post seemed to have died of a heart attack for a electroshock treatment for depression so it seems that he also has an unfortunate demise. At least Alonzo Church died of old age.