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The Shortest Papers Ever Published (2016)

382 points| diodorus | 8 years ago |paperpile.com | reply

93 comments

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[+] johnjwang|8 years ago|reply
Although 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

It's less than a full page in the original journal.

[+] ziotom78|8 years ago|reply
Agreed. 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!
[+] alvis|8 years ago|reply
I love this example which shows how a "novel" publication can be that simple and beautiful.
[+] kendallpark|8 years ago|reply
This guy solved two open problems in mathematics because he mistook them for a homework assignment:

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|8 years ago|reply
Very, 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

[+] folli|8 years ago|reply
What'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.2016007...

This makes it the most expensive piece of literature (cost per word) that I know of.

[+] visarga|8 years ago|reply
Those journals got to recoup their expenses and hard work. /s
[+] onychomys|8 years ago|reply
Since it's zero words long, it would be the most expensive piece of literature no matter what price they set on it!
[+] Vinnl|8 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, most scientific and scholarly literature is among the most expensive pieces of literature.
[+] danohu|8 years ago|reply
How 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...

[+] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
> 267 – 1 = 147,573,952,589,676,412,927 by hand

I think I spotted an error there.

[+] slazaro|8 years ago|reply
> 2047 is a composite number with factors 23 and 87.

This is another error (though this one is actually in the article). The factors are 23 and 89.

[+] 2sk21|8 years ago|reply
A 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 :-)
[+] blauditore|8 years ago|reply
I 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|8 years ago|reply
That'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.
[+] whyenot|8 years ago|reply
My 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|8 years ago|reply
I want to know what the peer reviews looked like.
[+] andy-wu|8 years ago|reply
There'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
[+] jerf|8 years ago|reply
In 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.
[+] dsacco|8 years ago|reply
On 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-max...

[+] sebleon|8 years ago|reply
This 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."

[+] ManuelKiessling|8 years ago|reply
Which in turn reminds me of Hemingway's shortest short story:

'For sale: baby shoes, never worn.'

[+] nesyt|8 years ago|reply
One of my favorite papers is a pretty short but famous one: Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?

http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~kleinsch/Gettier.pdf

[+] leephillips|8 years ago|reply
How 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.
[+] lou1306|8 years ago|reply
Another 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.

[+] vadimberman|8 years ago|reply
Was the superluminal neutrino paper still relevant after they discovered it was an error?

Or it's something completely different?

[+] eru|8 years ago|reply
Negative 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.