
What papers should everyone read? - Theoretical Computer Science - ColinWright
http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-papers-should-everyone-read
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calculon
Anything written by Leslie Lamport is worth the effort.

Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System (seminal paper
which won various awards): [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html#time-clocks)

That link actually takes you to a complete list of Lamport's works.

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jpitz
I wish I could upvote twice. Lamport's writing is _very_ accessible ( at least
to this college dropout ) and I really enjoyed reading Time, Clocks and the
Ordering of Events. Paxos Made Simple is another favorite:
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html#paxos-simple).

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Jun8
This is a great list. I would add:

* The stable marriage problem (D. Gale and L. S. Shapley: "College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage", American Mathematical Monthly 69, 9-14, 1962.), <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem>

* Knuth's Dancing Links algorithm [http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/papers/dancing-color...](http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/papers/dancing-color.ps.gz)

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iqster
"A tutorial on Hidden Markov Models and selected applications in speech
recognition" (by Lawrence Rabiner) - blew me away.

link:
[http://www.ece.ucsb.edu/Faculty/Rabiner/ece259/Reprints/tuto...](http://www.ece.ucsb.edu/Faculty/Rabiner/ece259/Reprints/tutorial%20on%20hmm%20and%20applications.pdf)

I'll also add "Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem" (by
Sandberg et al.) - fantastic read.

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calculon
Brewer's CAP Theorem

The first link is the paper which constituted the proof of the theorem, the
other two provide more context and background.

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.20....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.20.1495&rep=rep1&type=pdf)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem>
[http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/brewers-cap-
theor...](http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/brewers-cap-theorem)

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shareme
There is one set of papers that applies to multi-areas...information Theory

Paper and Journal article list is here:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory>

Its one of the most important theories of the modern science age of the
19th/20th century

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jey
Shannon's original paper is still a surprisingly good read: [http://cm.bell-
labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd...](http://cm.bell-
labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf)

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_delirium
Seconded; imo this paper is a pretty good introduction to the basic concepts
and motivations of information theory even today. Impressive for a 63-year-old
paper.

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evgen
If you want a reminder of what a stud Shannon was, remember that his masters
thesis (A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits) proved that you
could use boolean algebra and boolean arithmetic to analyze the circuits and
relays used in the telephone networks at the time. It then went one step
further and proved that the inverse was also true, you could use relays and
switches to perform boolean logic operations -- this was the key insight that
made digital electronics possible. Not too bad for work that did not even get
him a Ph.D. :)

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ignifero
Something on quantum computation like, Shor's algorithm:
<http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0010034>

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ColinWright
That's already there. Did you read the linked item?

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ignifero
Ouch. Really sorry about that. Wish i could delete it. I would also add any
paper by David Deutsch on quantum communication like this:
<http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/quant-ph/9906007v2>

