
The Shortest Papers Ever Published (2016) - diodorus
https://paperpile.com/blog/shortest-papers/
======
johnjwang
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](http://www.pnas.org/content/36/1/48.full)

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

~~~
tinyrick2
His Ph.D. thesis is also relatively short (just 28 pages):

[https://rbsc.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/Non-
Cooperati...](https://rbsc.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/Non-
Cooperative_Games_Nash.pdf)

~~~
lancebeet
Is this some sort of draft? I've seen manuscripts from the 30s that are much
more legible.

~~~
bstamour
My supervisor's thesis from the 70's is in about as good as shape as the one
linked. Must depend on when it was scanned.

------
tacon
One of the shortest papers ever, or maybe the longest:

[https://johnmorton1000.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/1976-recu...](https://johnmorton1000.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/1976-recursive.pdf)

~~~
mygo
If you want to see what he did there, read again from the start of this
sentence.

------
kendallpark
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig#Mathematical_statistics)

"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
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](https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoms/1177729695)

------
folli
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...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/ciuz.201600750/full)

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

~~~
visarga
Those journals got to recoup their expenses and hard work. /s

~~~
hateduser2
I 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
I'm sure they could price by number of pages.

------
danohu
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...](https://musingsonmath.com/2012/10/31/one-long-
multiplication-problem-revisited/)

~~~
jacquesm
> 267 – 1 = 147,573,952,589,676,412,927 by hand

I think I spotted an error there.

~~~
smichel17
It should be 2^67 - 1.

~~~
jacquesm
That was the error.

------
2sk21
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
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
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.

~~~
tgb
I 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
Well, 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
Yeah, 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).

------
whyenot
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
I want to know what the peer reviews looked like.

~~~
lallysingh
OK?

------
andy-wu
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvvkJT8myeI)

~~~
jerf
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.

~~~
fastball
A citation would absolutely be appropriate. However, you have it the wrong way
around.

This blog post was published Jun 17, 2016.

The Numberphile video was published Dec 7, 2016.

~~~
jerf
I stand corrected then. And disappointed... I like the Numberphile videos.

------
seanmcdirmid
Reminds me of [http://www.tinytocs.org](http://www.tinytocs.org), computer
science papers whose bodies must be 140 characters or less.

~~~
a_c
twitter henceforth

------
dsacco
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...](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/7330/which-math-paper-maximizes-
the-ratio-importance-length)

------
sebleon
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."

~~~
zoul
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fiction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fiction)

~~~
personlurking
I 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.

~~~
juliendorra
365 tomorrows might be the right length for you:
[https://365tomorrows.com/](https://365tomorrows.com/) (only science fiction)

------
jahsjahs
Gareth 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/...](https://academic.oup.com/analysis/article-
abstract/38/4/208/131350?redirectedFrom=fulltext)

------
nesyt
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](http://www-
bcf.usc.edu/~kleinsch/Gettier.pdf)

~~~
leephillips
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.

~~~
bhritchie
It'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.

------
ar-jan
A 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)

------
mzl
A 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)

------
dotancohen
Though 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
Uh

[http://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/files/2014/06/nc...](http://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/files/2014/06/nchem_-
Chemical-Free.pdf)

[http://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/2014/06/a-chemic...](http://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/2014/06/a-chemical-
free-paper.html)

~~~
dotancohen
To be fair, I should note that those publications published only the abstract
and eliminated the actual research results.

(lrf v'z wbxvat)

------
xbryanx
Reminds 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/pean...](https://www.improbable.com/airchives/classical/articles/peanut_butter_rotation.html)

------
lou1306
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
Was the superluminal neutrino paper still relevant after they discovered it
was an error?

Or it's something completely different?

~~~
eru
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.

------
purelitmass
Has anyone made a self referential paper on recursion? That would tickle me
pink.

~~~
supermdguy
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15737998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15737998)

------
stevefan1999
Is there any paper that can be both short, concise and deep?

------
BenjiWiebe
Cool!

------
l0b0
QED.

------
satyajeet23
Excellent.

------
isaaclyman
Huh.

------
QAPereo
_If_

[https://m.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/best-
spartan...](https://m.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/best-spartan-
laconic-phrases-boldest-wittiest-lines-ever-recorded.html)

~~~
jwilk
Non-mobile link:

[http://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/best-
sparta...](http://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/best-spartan-
laconic-phrases-boldest-wittiest-lines-ever-recorded.html)

------
kbutler
Ah.

------
EGreg
Ducks swim.

------
sunstone
E=mc^2 . Thank you and good night.

------
yeukhon
What’s purpose? Seriously?

------
1ris
"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
Did you read the whole article? This example and a couple other "empty page"
examples are given lower down in the list.

~~~
jwilk
From 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
> 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'.

