HN Explorer

97 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] thread
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
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.
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...

"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

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.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
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

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

alvis
I love this example which shows how a "novel" publication can be that simple and beautiful.
ziotom78
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!
tinyrick2
His Ph.D. thesis is also relatively short (just 28 pages):

https://rbsc.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/Non-Cooperati...

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
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.
kayhi
The discovery of DNA was also a page and yielded a Nobel prize

https://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/watsoncrick.pdf

eqmvii
I always loved this line:

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

(Your link appears broken, btw)

elsherbini
The discovery of the structure of DNA*. DNA had been known as one of the components of cells for a long time, and the Avery, Macleod, and McCarty paper from 1944[0] showed that DNA was the substance that carried information, rather than protein.

[0] http://jem.rupress.org/content/79/2/137

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
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.

thriftwy
I once had a directory with huge number of fiction books, and I've sorted it by size asc. Most of the first few dozens of entries were amusing.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
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/

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.

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'.

ehsankia
You are correct, thank you for pointing it out, I'll try to be more conscious about it in the future :)
sunstone
E=mc^2 . Thank you and good night.
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.

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 :-)
yeukhon
What’s purpose? Seriously?
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...

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.
Vinnl
Unfortunately, most scientific and scholarly literature is among the most expensive pieces of literature.
delinka
“Scientific.” “Scholarly.”

Given its, uh, content, this particular paper can really be classified as anything.

Vinnl
"most"

i.e. I wasn't talking about this specific paper, but most of all the other papers.

delinka
Indeed you were not. However, given that you generalized about the categories within which this paper presumably lies, I felt it amusing to point out that, using this paper as a start, one could generalize about any particular categories of papers.
Vinnl
Oh, that might just be the result of my not being a native speaker. In my language, the term "scientific" refers to articles in both the Humanities and Social Sciences as well as what Science refers to in English. Hence, I usually feel the need to specify all of those. In other words: it had nothing to do with the mentioned article being part of those domains :)
onychomys
Since it's zero words long, it would be the most expensive piece of literature no matter what price they set on it!
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

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.

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).