Great Computer Science Papers?

slevin writes "Recently I listened to a talk by Alan Kay who mentioned that many 'new' software ideas had already been discovered decades earlier by computer scientists - but 'nobody reads these great papers anymore.' Over the years I have had the opportunity to read some really great and thought-provoking academic papers in Computer Science and would like to read more, but there are just too many to sort through. I'm wondering what great or seminal papers others have encountered. Since Google has no answers, perhaps we can come up with a list for the rest of the world?"

Comments

Classic papers

[thvv]

"The UNIX Time-Sharing System," by Dennis Ritchie & Ken Thompson, is one of the best-written papers ever. The elegance of thought and economy of description set a standard we should all aspire to.
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/cacm.ht ml

I list several more classics on my "Software Engineering Reading List" page at
http://www.multicians.org/thvv/swe-readings.ht ml

Don't read the originals

[cperciva]

If nobody reads those "great old papers" any more, there's probably a reason. Sometimes the ideas have been superceeded; sometimes they weren't any good to begin with; often the papers are simply really hard to understand. The fact that people seriously suggest reading "great papers" reflects on the immaturity of the field; in a field like mathematics, hardly anyone ever reads the original papers (even for work done in the 20th century), instead opting to read someone else's simplification/clarification of the ideas.

We speak of the TAoCP as "the bible", but I'm not sure if there are any "new" ideas there; rather, the value of TAoCP is as a compilation and exposition of all the best ideas other people have produced.

Learn about great algorithms; don't worry about reading great papers.

Re:Nay, archetypal...

[Space cowboy]

Alan Turing was a genius, pure and simple.

His crypto work during the war was massively significant in winning the battle of the Atlantic, his ideas on programming, AI, neural networks, and the more-public "turing test" were breathtaking and groundbreaking. Less well known is his theory of non-linear biology, and some exceptional papers in physics. A modern version of the renaissance scientist, the michaelangelo of his day.

The hounding of him (because he was gay), arrest, loss of clearance, and subsequent suicide by cyanide in '54 was a shameful treatment of one of the most brilliant men in science this century.

Simon.

You want the Technomanifestos!

[A. Brate]

This is shameless self-promotion, but you should read my book!

Technomanifestos discusses the truly thought-provoking, inspirational, seminal computer papers of the 20th century, from Turing's "On Computable Numbers" and "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", to Alan Kay's "Personal Dynamic Media" to Larry Wall's States of the Perl Onion.

The book delves into the historical, biographical, and scientific context of works such as these and follows the thread of inspiration to today's world. If you want to know where the Internet germinated, or how Marshall McLuhan and Pierre de Chardin influenced the World Wide Web (or even who McLuhan and de Chardin are!) you should pick up my book. And then read it.

Technomanifestos tracks the evolution of the MIT hacker, from the dapper Boston Brahmin Vannevar Bush to the famously unkempt Richard Stallman, and introduces the cast of lesser-known (to the non-Slashdot world) but crucially inventive individuals such as Ivan Sutherland and Seymour Papert.

Moreover, it discusses how the truly great computing ideas come from people who recognize that technology, especially information technology, has the power to transform people and society--these are (in the words of similarly great books) tools for thought and dream machines.

Or if you have no interest in helping me pay my DSL bill, you can go straight to the sources, many of which are available online.

Donald E. Knuth

[roffe]

Donald Knuth has written a lot of interesting papers, but his paper on TeXs line-breaking algoritm

• Defines the state of the art in digital typesetting
• Is a textbook example of how a scientific paper should be written: it outlines the history of the problem, gives historical and current examples, defines the problem statement and discusses the suggested solution.

and as far as I know, the algoritm is still state of the art and is used only by TeX, InDesign and an addition to QuarkXPress.