The Shortest Ever Papers - Numberphile

Tony Padilla discusses some of the shortest math papers to be published. From Conway to Nash.
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Videos by Brady Haran

[RexGalilae]

the first one is purely savage. one simply doesn't get to fire shots at the king of mathematics like this guy did

[MrCheeze]

Not a fan of the second paper, they were clearly going out of their way to snipe the record for least words, even going so far as to sacrifice clarity and sensible formatting for that goal. The first paper you showed is far more elegant: it provides all the information anyone could reasonably ask for, and still only takes two sentences to do it.

[WakenerOne]

Not mathematical, but when it comes to brevity in communication, the prize goes to Victor Hugo. Hugo went on vacation as Les Miserables was being published. Wanting to know how sales of the book were going, he wrote a letter to his publisher which read simply, "?"


The publisher sent a response to the author which read "!"

[adityakhanna]

It's like mathematicians spitting one liners and then dropping the mic.

[PetraKann]

TIL
that "The Effects of Peanut Butter on the Rotation of the Earth", a
study co-authored by hundreds of physicists, is only one sentence long:
"So far as we can determine, peanut butter has no effect on the rotation
of the earth."

[miriamrosemary]

(5:11) "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of writer's block" - I laughed so hard. Just brilliant.

[pitthepig]

I liked the blank "comprehensive overview of chemical-free consumer products". Some people should have to "read" it XD

[PhilBagels]

Someone should publish
one of these shortest papers
in haiku format.

[onlyjohnrulz]

I think Riemann's paper "On the Number of Primes Less Than a Given Magnitude" deserves a mention. At 9 or 10 pages, it essentially founded analytic number theory, and states a hypothesis that remains one of the greatest unsolved problem in mathematics

[DodderingOldMan]

I read a bit of John Nash's thesis. I didn't understand a word of it, but I did find a typo. I felt smart. No, wait, I mean... pathetic.

[imeredithc]

Another very short paper with a lot of impact per word is the paper that Watson and Crick wrote describing the structure of DNA--only 2 pages!

[spiffo]

well the "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of 'writers block'" one has infinite impact per word, or perhaps an undefined impact

[seanflood]

The urban myth is probably referring to George Dantzig, a statitician who solved previously unanswered problems that he had mistaken for homework.

[mrmimeisfunny]

1:28 that is the mathematician equivalent of clickbait

[xenialafleur]

There is a short story by Edward Wellen titled If Eve had failed to conceive. It's zero words long.

[pluvius]

While it's great to see my fellow West Virginian get recognized for having great short papers, as someone with a biology degree I have to give the impact-to-words-ratio award to Watson's and Crick's "A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid, " arguably the most important paper in the history of the life sciences. It fits on a single double-column page, and toward the end it contains this cute quote written as if the researchers had no idea of the enormity of what they'd discovered:

"It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

[colinmcgrail]

>Poissonian

Something seems fishy about that

[LARAUJO_]

Having tons of information just to meet certain writing criteria is a hugely annoying problem I have with modern sciences, so seeing these was a breath of fresh air.

[mah]

I had a professor who's Ph.D thesis was far shorter than normal. Only 19 or 20 pages. He was worried that his committee wouldn't let him pass his defense because of the unusual length. But they did. Paul Erdos was actually one of the people on the committee, too.

[Soliloquy]

I'll just say that a picture is worth a thousand words.