the first one is purely savage. one simply doesn't get to fire shots at the king of mathematics like this guy did
@robiniekiller457 жыл бұрын
Rex Galilae yeah
@MsKritiChauhan7 жыл бұрын
look up leonard euler. euler = king of maths. the first short paper disproved "euler's conjecture" by stating a counterexample, thus firing a shot at the "king of maths" (awesome comment, as evidenced by 180 likes in around 2 hrs :))
@TomParis517 жыл бұрын
I think I can explain the metaphors he used: king of mathermatics: Euler to fire shots at: disproving him (or at least one of his conjectures) OP is certainly correct in saying that there arent many people who have achieved this in their life
@MasterJack27 жыл бұрын
I do not mean to offend you and if I am doing it anyway I am sorry, but you asked *what?* implying you didnt get it, he just wanted to make it clear for you since every evidence up there seemed to mean you didnt get it.
@uuu123437 жыл бұрын
A. L. You should have used "Wut" LOL
@MrCheeze7 жыл бұрын
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.
@completeandunabridged.46067 жыл бұрын
MrCheeze At least it was a trickshot.
@5JSX57 жыл бұрын
maybe they just did it for the hidden toucan pun (n+2 can)
@brian554xx7 жыл бұрын
5JSX5 I believe that would be ntoucan.
@theparkourhobo7 жыл бұрын
+Sen Zen Actually, Conway strikes me as a pretty playful guy. Trying to break the record for shortest paper just for fun seems like something he would do.
@alarageref24817 жыл бұрын
Also seems up his alley to publish a paper that doesn't achieve its main goal yet also be insightful
@WakenerOne7 жыл бұрын
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 "!"
@kevinwells97516 жыл бұрын
Which was the one and only time Victor Hugo achieved brevity
@greenjelly016 жыл бұрын
Pity they didn't have emoticons back then.
@hoyohoyo9225 жыл бұрын
He was just tired of writing at that point
@Hjtrne5 жыл бұрын
That's not really brevity. It's just the only question he would ever have asked in that circumstance. Imagine sending a '?' to a random person, and getting a reply of 'what book, I'm not even a publisher'. That what would make sense, if the '?' was actually conveying information succinctly.
@jetison3335 жыл бұрын
@@Hjtrne a large part of conveying information succinctly is know the context, and thus what you could leave out. This just happnes to be a case that you can leave out the whole question and still communicate successfully.
@adityakhanna1137 жыл бұрын
It's like mathematicians spitting one liners and then dropping the mic.
@ravengaming46047 жыл бұрын
this is one beautiful comment
@MrHSX7 жыл бұрын
+
@isabellabornberg21537 жыл бұрын
Aditya Khanna +
@floridmonkey27237 жыл бұрын
+
@englishmuon19317 жыл бұрын
Reminds me of Dr Caulfield lecturing DEs at cambs. He'd often finish the lecture by hitting his pen on the lectern, saying "drops the mic" and then walks out lol
@miriamrosemary91107 жыл бұрын
(5:11) "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of writer's block" - I laughed so hard. Just brilliant.
@antoniolewis10167 жыл бұрын
+
@AxtheDragon7 жыл бұрын
Someone showed me that paper while I was writing my masters thesis... I was very tempted to squeeze it in as a citation somewhere :-)
@aykut047 жыл бұрын
I thought the same thing lol. I have a paper i'm working on right now, i think i could squeeze it in somewhere. Challenge Accepted!
@Halogrunt12347 жыл бұрын
if you look at the article on pubmed, there are tons of medical articles that do!
@starcubey7 жыл бұрын
It is nice to know that you laughed and that you can quote a video with a time stamp, but why does this comment have 464 likes?
@PetraKann7 жыл бұрын
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."
@adamspaans87877 жыл бұрын
Even better; does a decreasing number or pirates cause global warming? Abstract: The evidence says yes But this is a classic example or causation and correlation
@starcubey7 жыл бұрын
Dang, and here I was thinking that the added mass would change the effect of gravity on the earth or something and that the conclusion was that if we gathered all of the peanut butter in the world in one spot, we could prolong the inevitable heat death of the earth by a few seconds somehow.
@gregthestoner64016 жыл бұрын
Wtf lol
@gkky-xx4mc5 жыл бұрын
@@adamspaans8787 Ah, I see you are an enlightened subject of His Holy Noodliness, too. R'amen
@EebstertheGreat5 жыл бұрын
That's not a real paper, it's an article in the magazine "Annals of Improbable Research."
@PhilBagels7 жыл бұрын
Someone should publish one of these shortest papers in haiku format.
@JohnnyDoeDoeDoe7 жыл бұрын
PhilBagels Your comment is not appreciated nearly enough my dear friend
@otto91417 жыл бұрын
enough my _dear_ friend* FTFY
@otto91417 жыл бұрын
Tanmay Nandanikar You also were wrong in the middle line, because it was way too long.
@Summy_997 жыл бұрын
+otto hammar a-ppre-ci-at-ed near-ly count them. There are 7. You're correct about the last line though
@Summy_997 жыл бұрын
Ohhhh I feel like an idiot now. For some reason only your reply and the first one were showing up in the youtube app so I thought you were responding to the first one
@pitthepig7 жыл бұрын
I liked the blank "comprehensive overview of chemical-free consumer products". Some people should have to "read" it XD
@amperzand91627 жыл бұрын
I mean, if you count software it arguably shouldn't be blank. :V
@MagicGonads7 жыл бұрын
Software uses ionic compounds and metallically bonded (soldered) materials which are chemicals.
@starcubey7 жыл бұрын
But I thought organic foods don't have chemicals! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
@MagicGonads7 жыл бұрын
Also the silica and plastics used in the supportive structures are chemicals. And if you're talking about pure software, not even as stored data, then it will still have a chemical effect on your brain.
@qwerty6876876 жыл бұрын
Software isn't a consumer product, though. When you use software, you don't consume it.
@onlyjohnrulz7 жыл бұрын
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
@imeredithc7 жыл бұрын
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!
@VeteranVandal7 жыл бұрын
Yep. And it is kinda interesting (and easy) to read. Recommend to anyone checking it.
@prolleytroblems7 жыл бұрын
This was the first one that came to mind!
@VeteranVandal7 жыл бұрын
Aditya Khanna If by "stealing" you mean "acknowledging their sources in the second paragraph and by concluding it is a helix based on the Bessel function pattern that the diffraction pattern suggests, and by drawing the physical consideration that the bases are inside instead of outside", then sure they "stole".
@acockbur7 жыл бұрын
Their last sentence probably has had the greatest impact of any in science: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."
@denisdaly17087 жыл бұрын
Meredith Lee You know. It probably has greater impact. Well done.
@spiffo53497 жыл бұрын
well the "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of 'writers block'" one has infinite impact per word, or perhaps an undefined impact
@midas88775 жыл бұрын
Infinity isn't defined
@thomas.thomas4 жыл бұрын
or zero impact
@spiffo53494 жыл бұрын
@@midas8877 correction: it is not well-defined
@xenotronia66813 жыл бұрын
@@midas8877 it is but okay
@DodderingOldMan7 жыл бұрын
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.
@0xCAFEF00D7 жыл бұрын
David Mitchell avatar. Perfect.
@GideonGleeful957 жыл бұрын
Now I'm just imagining David Mitchell saying it. It actually fits pretty well.
@covalencedust26037 жыл бұрын
You could have told him... in 2015.
@christianfarina30567 жыл бұрын
lol.
@PianoKwanMan7 жыл бұрын
You have 42 thumbs up
@xenialafleur7 жыл бұрын
There is a short story by Edward Wellen titled If Eve had failed to conceive. It's zero words long.
@14112ido7 жыл бұрын
Xenia Lafleur damn... it's pure genius.
@amisfitpuivk7 жыл бұрын
There's another one called If Eve Really Did Conceive: Endless incest.
@jensen3337 жыл бұрын
+Hi genius!
@ronfish83755 жыл бұрын
I should compile a condensed version of Christian scripture including only parts that were true. It also, would be zero words.
@avelkm4 жыл бұрын
@@amisfitpuivk given 5-10% of Neanderthal DNA, not always an incest.
@seanflood71517 жыл бұрын
The urban myth is probably referring to George Dantzig, a statitician who solved previously unanswered problems that he had mistaken for homework.
@antanis4 жыл бұрын
Isn't this the basis for goodwill hunting? And related to graph theory?
@beeble20034 жыл бұрын
But that's not an urban myth: it actually happened.
@georgelionon90503 жыл бұрын
@@beeble2003 Yes and no. The story is true, but the PhD thesis was 57 pages long. So it's a 1 pager is the myth part.
@bimbogiallo Жыл бұрын
@@georgelionon9050 The story is also true in the sense that Danzig's supervisor told him not to worry about his PhD thesis as he could have just put the two papers in a binder and he'd have accepted it
@NoriMori19926 ай бұрын
@@bimbogiallo "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."
@mrmimeisfunny7 жыл бұрын
1:28 that is the mathematician equivalent of clickbait
@matthewstuckenbruck58345 жыл бұрын
I actually heard Alexander Soifer speak and it definitely makes sense that he would write a clickbait paper
@colinmcgrail71097 жыл бұрын
>Poissonian Something seems fishy about that
@cptn_n3m0125 жыл бұрын
In french poisson means fish
@matty78345 жыл бұрын
@@cptn_n3m012 (that's the joke)
@jakimoretti77715 жыл бұрын
@@cptn_n3m012 he should've made a joke about it, right?
@hfyaer5 жыл бұрын
I'm french so I got it but I don't understand why the french word for fish seems to be common knowledge here...
@nablahnjr.67284 жыл бұрын
alright Colin
@pluvius92657 жыл бұрын
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."
@mah389004 жыл бұрын
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.
@LARAUJO_04 жыл бұрын
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.
@Soliloquy0847 жыл бұрын
I'll just say that a picture is worth a thousand words.
@TheEvilVargon7 жыл бұрын
Does that then make it a long paper?
@Soliloquy0847 жыл бұрын
Based on the papers I've read, and with two figures giving it 2000 words, it's still on the short side, just maybe not as impressively short.
@featheredice7 жыл бұрын
If £1 is worth a loaf of bread then does that mean I can make toast out of a £1 coin?
@TheEvilVargon7 жыл бұрын
featheredice Now we are asking the real questions
@victorotene7 жыл бұрын
Probably not.
@memertarian24344 жыл бұрын
"Alright class, so for this essay there's no word requirement, just give a complete answer"
@matthewmcclure87995 жыл бұрын
two short important papers: E. W. Dijkstra, 'A note on two problems in connexion with graphs', Num. Math. (computer science: canonical shortest path algorithm) E. Gettier, 'Is true justified belief knowledge?', Analysis (philosophy: refutation of the classical model of knowledge since Plato) both are about two-and-a-half pages
@paulpeters55467 жыл бұрын
Another short paper is the Abridged Table of Even Primes
@bi1iruben7 жыл бұрын
Forget about the "Abridged" version, the full paper "Table of Even Primes" is shorter.
@ModKijko7 жыл бұрын
The abridged version doesn't include '2' but the the full table obviously does.
@msolec20007 жыл бұрын
But the 2 is still shorter than the word "abridged".
@michaelbauers88007 жыл бұрын
I still feel uncomfortable that 2 is not a prime. But there's reasons... :)
@ianwalker65467 жыл бұрын
Since when is 2 not a prime? Pretty certain it is! You might be thinking of 1, which is nowadays excluded from the primes by virtue of the fact that many, many theorems would have to be re-stated with 1 as a special case, including the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic. 2 isn't a Gaussian prime though, but neither are 5, 13, 17... etc.
@magnusdagbro82267 жыл бұрын
In control theory, there's a paper titled "Guaranteed Margins for LQG Regulators" by John C. Doyle. Abstract "-There are none."
@SuperPeacebreaker7 жыл бұрын
get rekt Euler lol xD
@Ostebrix7 жыл бұрын
too bad Euler wasnt alive anymore in 1966 xD he woulda been like "dang it I'm not perfect"
@oz_jones7 жыл бұрын
"Dang, u got me there bro" - Euler, probably.
@martinshoosterman5 жыл бұрын
@@Ostebrix realistically, if euler had still been alive im 1966 (assuming his mental faculties never deteriorated) First of all, hed have disproven himself a long time ago, second of all, hed probably have proven everything else.
@Ostebrix5 жыл бұрын
you see... when you respond to someone 2 years late you will very likely get this response: lol I don't remember watching this video or commenting that soooo whatever man
@knuthalvorsen11967 жыл бұрын
Task: Write about laziness. Answer: This is laziness. He got an A. This is lore from my country.
@marmelade51183 жыл бұрын
Here we tell it with "What is risk?" "This is risk."
@Unelith3 жыл бұрын
Task: Name 5 of your biggest flaws Answer: 1. Laziness
@power-max7 жыл бұрын
Thanks, this inspired me to put this much effort into a PhD!!! :D
@daiduongdaviddinh1404 жыл бұрын
Is 1+1=2? Abstract. Sometimes. References E. Galois, A. Grohendieck, S. Ramanujan
@MikeRosoftJH4 жыл бұрын
The two expressions are equal, but you have messed up the reference. The correct reference is: Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, volume 2, page 86. ("The above proposition is occasionally useful.")
@duncanw99014 жыл бұрын
@@MikeRosoftJH 1+1=0 in Z/2Z
@escapeadil4 жыл бұрын
@@MikeRosoftJH I found Principia Mathematica vol. 2 but couldn't see 1+1=2. What might I be doing wrong?! Is it definitely on page 86? EDIT - never mind, I see it now. Just looks confusing!
@jakobunfried26694 жыл бұрын
@@duncanw9901 so the correct answer is "depends on the 1 and 2" =)
@AviMehra4 жыл бұрын
@@duncanw9901 but then 0=2. The reason it is always true is that 2 is defined as 1+1
@ITR7 жыл бұрын
"Is it possible to get a one-page paper written in Liberation Serif with font size 65 published in a peer reviewed scientific journal?" That would fill up a 8.50'' x 11.00'' page with 1.00'' margins.
@mmmmmmmmmmmmm5 жыл бұрын
But the margins will be too small to fit it
@sipos04 жыл бұрын
Whether it is possible or not would probably depend on your definition of scientific. I don't think it is possible unless there is a disappointingly bad peer reviewed scientific journal, or you have a very broad definition of scientific.
@polymarc21717 жыл бұрын
One of the shortest thesis was the thesis by C.N. Yang. His thesis was published as "On the Angular Distribution in Nuclear Reactions and Coincidence Measurements" and was about 30 pages, but apparently, it took his advisor Teller had quite a bit of trouble getting Yang to make his thesis longer. Teller kept asking him to extend his results, although even the original 4 or 5 pages would have been sufficient for a Ph.D. I heard this while doing my Ph.D. at Stony Brook, but I can't confirm it personally.
@williamnathanael4123 жыл бұрын
I kinda hoped Gettier's paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" made the cut.
@KC-dw6yz6 жыл бұрын
In terms of impact factor per word, I'd like to also suggest Leo Esaki's original paper announcing the creation of the tunnel diode: it is titled 'New Phenomenon in Narrow Germanium p-n Junctions'. It's one page long, has hand drawn bandgap diagrams, and won the Nobel Prize in Physics for it's author!
@androidkenobi7 жыл бұрын
1974 seems to have been a hilarious year for papers
@slingshotninja69707 жыл бұрын
when you want your P.Hd but you lazy AF
@rkan27 жыл бұрын
But to be honest. You only need to be more intelligent than the on who could explain your findings.. You just do it and avoid the unnecessary bits.. :D
@Roflwes7 жыл бұрын
rkan2 p
@ConManAU7 жыл бұрын
As Blaise Pascal probably said (but has since been attributed to all the people these quotes are usually attributed to), "I apologise for writing such a long letter. I would have written a shorter one, but I didn't have the time."
@JivanPal6 жыл бұрын
*Ph.D.
@loveforsberg5305 жыл бұрын
Arguably the whole point of mathematics is condensation of information, in an accessible way.
@johannesderspinner5 жыл бұрын
In philosophy there is a three page paper ("Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" by Edmond Gettier), which had a huuuge impact on the subject.
@mateusgabriel30135 жыл бұрын
Came here to comment this.
@KucheKlizma5 жыл бұрын
What's the total KDA? How does it compare to The Communist Manifesto by K.M.?
@Sladepheonix7 жыл бұрын
My grandfather once got assigned a paper in philosophy class with the prompt: "Why?" He replied simply, "Why not?" I think he aced it.
@zaramomadi55693 жыл бұрын
Did he get his Nobel Prize or not?
@General12th7 жыл бұрын
Now I want to write a paper with the title, "How many theses that end with a question answer that question in the abstract?", and then cite that very paper in the abstract.
@beeble20034 жыл бұрын
Better to go for the paradox with "How many papers whose title is a question _do not_ answer that question in the abstract?"
@repmel7 жыл бұрын
Okay, here's my shot: Is the Riemann Hypothesis true? Probably.
@gbx51804 жыл бұрын
Prove it!
@astropgn7 жыл бұрын
The article that revealed to the world the helicoidal structure of our DNA is also very short and concise. I think it has the same impact that Nash paper had, but for the sciences of life
@jonproxy27587 жыл бұрын
one of the only trending videos that isn't an ad
@JackLe11277 жыл бұрын
1:25 wait John Conway the game of life guy?
@capitalist887 жыл бұрын
Yes! :) He's been in some of Brady's videos.
@JackLe11277 жыл бұрын
ooooooh
@ZardoDhieldor7 жыл бұрын
Don't let Mr. Conway hear that! He hates when people only take about his game.
@alexanderstiefelmann59827 жыл бұрын
My first associations with the name Conway are even more obscure. Chained arrow notation and surreal numbers.
@u.v.s.55837 жыл бұрын
You mean one of the fathers of the ATLAS of finite groups? The discoverer of the Conway group? The man who made a digital computer out of urinal parts?
@geraldmerkowitz43607 жыл бұрын
The actual shortest story I was told about is this one : "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door..." -*Knock*, Fredric Brown, 1948
@ModKijko7 жыл бұрын
For sale: baby shoes, never worn
@geraldmerkowitz43607 жыл бұрын
mod prime I had to think about it twice before understanding it
@RobinDSaunders7 жыл бұрын
KNOCK KNOCK. "Who's there?" DEATH. "Death wh-"
@leungchoihung24657 жыл бұрын
sarcastic bowl of cornflakes "Me We"
@cecasiahaan68017 жыл бұрын
Aniyoyo 良采康 LIGHGHT
@haleffect90117 жыл бұрын
That one on writer's block is brilliant
@johndoeing7 жыл бұрын
But what were the LONGEST papers/thesis?
@100najaja5 жыл бұрын
Classification of finite simple groups
@FM-kl7oc5 жыл бұрын
"The complete list of all integers" by Chuck Norris (2005)
@dog_owner5 жыл бұрын
A proof that TREE(3) is finite (which has yet to exist).
@someperson51375 жыл бұрын
dog Then you get to TREE(4) lol
@dog_owner5 жыл бұрын
No TREE(4) doesn't need a proof
@starrychloe7 жыл бұрын
I think Satoshi Nakamoto's bitcoin whitepaper had the most impact per word.
@covalencedust26037 жыл бұрын
That's a different kind of impact though. You can't compare a mathematical discovery with an invention. And still, inventing game theory is a way bigger deal than inventing the bitcoin.
@jogiff7 жыл бұрын
Sebi20070 but did any of Nash' papers get libertarian retards to cream themselves over a pyramid scheme?
@goshisanniichi7 жыл бұрын
I was always under the impression that it was Gauss's proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra that was the super short one. I looked for but could not find any scan of it or anything to substantiate that.
@Mrwiseguy1016906 жыл бұрын
Disproving Euler with a counterexample = Legend mathematician status
@rickrijpers47307 жыл бұрын
Just needed this after a boring day of school
@kevinjohnson45314 жыл бұрын
I think the anecdote you're describing at the end of the video is about Dantzig. [from wikipedia] An event in Dantzig's life became the origin of a famous story in 1939, while he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. Near the beginning of a class for which Dantzig was late, professor Jerzy Neyman wrote two examples of famously unsolved statistics problems on the blackboard. When Dantzig arrived, he assumed that the two problems were a homework assignment and wrote them down. According to Dantzig, the problems "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for the two problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue. Six weeks later, Dantzig received a visit from an excited professor Neyman, who was eager to tell him that the homework problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics. He had prepared one of Dantzig's solutions for publication in a mathematical journal. As Dantzig told it in a 1986 interview in the College Mathematics Journal: "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."
@beeble20034 жыл бұрын
I wonder if Dantzig's memory had faded by the time of this interview. Wikipedia says the homework incident occurred in 1939 but, because of Dantzig's work for the military during WWII, he didn't finish his PhD until 1946. Of couse, it's possible that Neyman said in 1940 that such a thesis would be acceptable ("Don't worry: you've already done enough" is something that grad students often need reassurance about) but that it didn't actually get submitted until after the war.
@allyourcode7 жыл бұрын
Oh man, I love the chemistry one. Classic XD
@breearbor42754 жыл бұрын
in the field of philosophy, there’s a famous short paper by Edmund Gettier called “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” the story goes that Gettier was a brilliant philosopher, but hardly ever published anything. frustrated with his lack of success, his colleagues locked him in a closet one day and said he couldn’t come out until he wrote a paper. so in barely three pages, he wrote this short piece which demonstrated that the classical definition of what counts as “knowledge”, universally accepted at the time, was completely inadequate in certain situations. the paper completely upturned the field of epistemology and for years people published new papers dealing with his challenges.
@god55353 жыл бұрын
Legend has it he is still feverishly working on another problem in his closet.
@pablogriswold4217 жыл бұрын
I think the legendary thesis about which you were taking was George Danzig's.
@kolumdium7 жыл бұрын
I think you are missing a t in George Dantzig. Do you know which paper exactly?
@pablogriswold4217 жыл бұрын
karatekid You're sure right! My phone autocorrected to Danzig, bit his name was indeed Dantzig. I think the paper was On the Fundamental Lemma of Neyman and Pearson.
@michaelbauers88007 жыл бұрын
Hold me closer George Danzig. Now that I read that attempt at humor, it wasn't as funny as thought it might be
@u.v.s.55837 жыл бұрын
That paper is a mammoth, it is almost full 7 pages long!
@pablogriswold4217 жыл бұрын
U.V. S. Hope that's sarcasm... Poe's Law?
@jcbdwsn4 жыл бұрын
In philosophy, Edmund Gettier's paper changed epistemology completely and disproved something held to since Aristotle in just a couple of pages.
@god55353 жыл бұрын
Is justified true belief knowledge?
@rosiefay72837 жыл бұрын
Another short paper with great impact is: Marcel Golay. Notes on Digital Coding. Proc. IRE. 37 (1949): 657. It described the error-correcting codes now known as Golay codes, which have proved useful in digital transmission over noisy channels.
@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself7 жыл бұрын
"Unsuccessful Self-treatment of Writer's Block" - LOL!
@ru4034211 ай бұрын
Every economics PhD student hopes to achieve what Nash did. Short but genius idea using relatively simple maths but achieve greatness (and of course, a nobel prize) Game theory is still one of the main concepts of Microeconomics, more than 70 years after that famous paper was published. What a beautiful mind.
@greenhorntenderfoot92617 жыл бұрын
Very cool stuff! It would be interesting to try measure the complexity of letters sent out by an organization using a computer program that measures the complexity of words as well as the length of sentences and look to see if there is a connection between the complexity of the letters and the number of people that contact the organization seeking clarification. Essentially is there an optimum length and complexity of a letter?
@wren17287 жыл бұрын
The story mentioned at the end of the video could be that of George Dantzig: 'An event in George Dantzig's life became the origin of a famous story in 1939 while he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. Near the beginning of a class for which Dantzig was late, professor Jerzy Neyman wrote two examples of famously unsolved statistics problems on the blackboard. When Dantzig arrived, he assumed that the two problems were a homework assignment and wrote them down. According to Dantzig, the problems "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for the two problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue.' Those problems formed the basis of his PhD thesis.
@singerofsongs4687 жыл бұрын
The Chemical-Free paper is hilarious.
@pinkdispatcher7 жыл бұрын
I also heard that myth about the famous 1-page thesis in school, but didn't think much of it except as a motivation for making your point as concise as possible.
@Spiderlanky7 жыл бұрын
The writers block one got me so deep in the feels that was amazing
@ajinkyatarodekar90993 жыл бұрын
Ikr I cried and shaked when I read that.
@MogaTange Жыл бұрын
Archimedes took 8 pages in The Sand Reckoner to “count” the number of grains of sand one would need to fill the universe.
@dalitas7 жыл бұрын
is there a Nobel price in economics? abstract: no, kinda. it's not a true Nobel price in economics; it's the riksbank's price in memory of Nobel
@Szederp7 жыл бұрын
I can usually follow things for about 3 minutes. This time I lost it after 10 seconds. Numberphile is getting better by the day.
@PaulBennett7 жыл бұрын
Huffman's thesis was 12 pages.
@MrSzybciutki7 жыл бұрын
after, or before compression?
@PaulBennett7 жыл бұрын
klingt net you're not wrong. His famous paper on entropy coding was not his thesis. My mistake.
@fabiangiesen3067 жыл бұрын
Yeah, "A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes" was not his thesis, it was a term paper. :) He was supposed to show optimality of Shannon-Fano codes, which are broadly similar but use a top-down subdivision construction (recursively split the set of symbols trying to keep the weights of both subsets as close as possible). Turns out that's not optimal, but Huffman's bottom-up procedure (repeatedly merge the two lowest-weight subsets) is.
@grlt237 жыл бұрын
You Sir, has won few internets by this comment :)
@jamesdecross10355 жыл бұрын
I do like this guy and his enthusiasm for his subject.
@MartinMenky7 жыл бұрын
wait till you see my first paper haha
@froidesprit7 жыл бұрын
Martin Menkyna was that it?
@MartinMenky7 жыл бұрын
MichaelKingsfordGray it's not gonna be THAT bad .. hopefully :D
@davecrupel28177 жыл бұрын
MichaelKingsfordGray 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
@towertopvids7 жыл бұрын
As far as the "myth" at then end, the only thing that comes to mind is the story of George Dantzig. He arrived late to class one day and saw problems on the board that he thought were assigned for homework. He then turned those papers in to the professor, apologizing for his tardiness. His "homework" provided solutions to two open problems in statistics. His adviser told him to just put those two problems together for his thesis.
@Pouk3D7 жыл бұрын
The writer's block one is genius.
@LyriaSiders11 ай бұрын
The first one should've included an abstract, and have it simply be: ''Abstract - 27^5+84^5+110^5+133^5=144^5''
@Callerooo7 жыл бұрын
There was a Numberphile video with James Grim where he talked about a student who was late to a class and misunderstood an assignment. He thought your were suppose to solve the assignment but it was, up until then, not solved. However, he solved it and James said that when he wanted to do a PHD his professor said that he only needed turn in the proof he made. Could that be the short PHD thesis they talk about? Can't remember the video though
@azlan1947 жыл бұрын
Are you talking about A Beautiful Mind movie reference?
@JannikPitt7 жыл бұрын
Georg Dantzig was the name of the matematician +NaCl on my food
@spyone48287 жыл бұрын
I remember this, but not from a Numberphile video. I found it on TV tropes, in a list of people who did something thought to be impossible because they didn't know it was supposed to be impossible. Here is the entry from their page "Achievements In Ignorance": (Quote)In 1939, George Dantzig, a mathematics graduate student, arrived late in class and copied what he thought was homework written on the blackboard. After taking longer than usual to solve the problems, he apologized to his professor for his lateness and turned them in. What he didn't know was that what he copied wasn't homework but two unsolved statistics theorems, the proofs of which he published. To this day, colleges and professors will sometimes place previously unsolved problems like these in with other more mundane problems on "entrance exams" or other evaluative tests, just to see if some brilliant young student who hasn't heard about the problem not being solved yet can find a solution nobody else thought to try. Dantzig's story eventually morphed into the Urban Legend of the student that was late for an exam and barely completed all the problems on the board only for him to be told that the final problem(s) were "unsolvable" problems and that he made history. The legend can be traced to Reverend Robert Schuller, whom Dantzig once met and told him about the blackboard incident only for Schuller to add the embellishments found in the legend.(End Quote)
@generic_programmer6 жыл бұрын
It's from the numberphile video about the problem in Will Hunting
@beeble20034 жыл бұрын
@@JannikPitt George, not Georg. He was born in the USA and named after George Bernard Shaw.
@tomelifeisjustonebig4 жыл бұрын
Tony and Holly are the best subjects / presenters because they’re the sort you’d love to sit down and have a beer with.
@charilaosmylonas50467 жыл бұрын
Not a "very" short paper, but Fourier's idea to use... well... Fourier series for solving the heat equation was in a 6 page paper. Here's your winner for influence/content per "words".
@zokalyx5 жыл бұрын
Indeed. This drastically changed many fields of physics, as well as mathematics. I mean, who would have thought quantum mechanics would use it?
@serenity7483 жыл бұрын
the paper about CRISPR Cas-9 is going to have the biggest impact on the world by far.
@oldcowbb7 жыл бұрын
but the margin still don't have enough space to contain it
@bobsquirrelking5 жыл бұрын
Not only does the Conway paper not actually answer the question it poses, but you could argue it isn't actually that short. A picture is worth a thousand words, so that paper comes in at just over 2000.
@robotguy7 жыл бұрын
The shortest abstract ever was in Physics, and contained no words at all. E=mc². The paper itself is only four pages long, and although it didn't win Einstein a Nobel (he got two others for Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect), it is the most famous equation in the world.
@talltroll70926 жыл бұрын
Which is impressive, considering that, strictly speaking, it is not the correct equation
@NXTangl6 жыл бұрын
Tall Troll Unless you understand m as relative mass, as modern physicists take it, and not rest mass.
@JohnDoe-ti2np2 жыл бұрын
"Ist die Trägheit eines Körpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhängig?" is actually three pages long, but it had no abstract. Also, Einstein won only one Nobel Prize, for the photoelectric effect.
@MichaelEdelman19544 жыл бұрын
Kenneth Arrow’s PhD thesis is another contender for shortest length and greatest influence. The story goes that the math department where he was studying rejected it, and so he shopped it around to different departments, ending up in economics,where they recognized its brilliance. It eventually led to his Nobel prize.
@richardfarrer56164 жыл бұрын
I want to write a paper "Is the proof cited in this paper self-referential?" with a proof, "Yes - see ".
@georgelionon90503 жыл бұрын
It's a more complicated way of the infamous logic simpleton. "This statement is true."
@ShaneTilton3 жыл бұрын
In 5:47, the law comes from journalism and it’s Betteridge's Law of Headlines ("Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no").
@Hecatonicosachoron7 жыл бұрын
Did Wittgenstein not submit theTractatus as his PhD thesis? Probably in terms of effortless theses this must be one of the best historical exaples of the 20th c.
@Co27Enigma6 жыл бұрын
If only scientific reports were this concise.
@bobthornton82826 жыл бұрын
A proof that the n side length equilateral triangle contains n^2 unit equilateral triangles is that the units can always fully cover the larger triangle, and the area of a shape grows with the sidelength^2 as it is expanded, so the area of a n-sidelength equilateral triangle must be n^2 times the area of a 1-sidelength equilateral triangle
@CliveWolfe7 жыл бұрын
Einsteins' paper on Mass-energy equivalence i.e. E = mc2 is only 2.5 pages. That's got to be up there?
@edminchau8115 жыл бұрын
That paper had one of the shortest abstracts ever. The whole abstract was: E=mc^2
@peterells17206 жыл бұрын
"Unknotting spheres in five dimensions" by EC Zeeman, 1960, is great. It is ~200 words long, including generalising the proof to unknotting n-spheres. It is available as a pdf online.
@jrod37557 жыл бұрын
"The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment Of A Case Of Writer's Block" ... (nothing's written) Genius
@CaspaB7 жыл бұрын
I was told (around 1979) that someone got a PhD by predicting ocean currents would make vortices much the same way that air movements generate cyclones and tornados. It supposedly took 24 hours from conception to final paper. The rules for writing a PhD thesis were changed soon after.
@thomassynths7 жыл бұрын
Conway's paper doesn't specify constraints on epsilon, so the whole paper is incorrect in the case epsilon > 1.
@DarkMaple687 жыл бұрын
epsilon ist generally assumed to be
@ZipplyZane7 жыл бұрын
Wouldn't it be >n?
@DarkMaple687 жыл бұрын
no, for epsilon>1 you would need 2n+1 more. therefore, the statement is false for n>1.
@ZipplyZane7 жыл бұрын
DarkMaple68 I think I'm getting the terminology messed up. I was thinking n was the size of the small triangle, when n is the size of the big triangle.
@covalencedust26037 жыл бұрын
Ye, the paper was obviously a joke or so. Maybe they made it that short on purpose as a bet or something.
@DissectingThoughts7 жыл бұрын
In philosophy we have 'Is justified true belief knowledge?' by Edmund Gettier. It's just about 2 and a half pages long but changed the philosophical consensus on the correct analysis of knowledge entirely almost over night.
@B3Band7 жыл бұрын
If I discovered some groundbreaking concept, I wouldn't waste time writing hundreds of pages, either! I just invented replicators! You get a drawing and a rant about hippies, and that's it!
@kushagramishra1729 Жыл бұрын
🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 About 3-4 months ago,I found a conjecture by myself,the Euler conjecture,I discovered it independently.I didn't know that Euler had found this before. I have been trying to prove this conjecture since then.but today,after watching this first paper,I was shocked.
@CaptainCalculus7 жыл бұрын
Isn't Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity only 13 pages long? Surely that would be up there in the #words vs impact section
@CaryInVictoria4 жыл бұрын
Very interesting and entertaining! I had a friend whose Ph.D. thesis (UC Berkeley) was 15 pages long. It dealt with a problem in queueing theory. I think that for most of us holding that degree it didn't take long to come to the realization that our thesis was really quite bad.
@asdasdasdasd7147 жыл бұрын
That first one deserves a "Thug Life"
@christopherstokes93932 жыл бұрын
For the second paper ("Can n^2 + 1 unit equilateral triangles cover an equilateral triangle of side > n, say n + ɛ?"), Figure 2 actually *does* answer the question (by showing that it's not possible in the case n = 1). In this case, n^2 + 1 = 2. However, two unit triangles are required to cover the base of the triangle (which has length 1 + ɛ) - and this leaves a small wedge at the top of the triangle which isn't covered. They could, of course, have communicated this more clearly - but then, their paper wouldn't be as short any more!!!
@kennstedas7 жыл бұрын
Check out Edmund Gettier, he crushed contemporary Epistemology based on Plato in like 3 pages
@neiloppa26207 жыл бұрын
kennstedas what's that?
@BulentBasaran7 жыл бұрын
Sorry, meant to reply to your question, but, mis-placed it above..
@kingchartsintradaytradings23096 жыл бұрын
I have my own conjecture here. a1^k + a2^k + ... + an^k (never equal to) = x^n for positive integers where n >k ... is short you will never find any positive integer solutions if number of terms of a i.e. (n) more than power used i.e. (k) for example a1^k + a2^k + a3^k (never equals) x^k for k>3 ... i.e. Next Generalization of Fermat's theorem. Just match number of terms a1 a2 ...an with n matching power k and say there is no integer solution for k>n ... Prove me wrong here! ...
@MitchBurns7 жыл бұрын
I actually didn't know that triangle thing before. Also, the triangle you started with, the one with length 2 with 4 inside of it, that looked suspiciously like the Triforce from Zelda.
@KuraIthys7 жыл бұрын
Yes. The triforce has always been very similar in nature to several things. Notably the fractal pattern referred to as 'the Sierpinski triangle' You do sometimes wonder what influences game designers sometimes...
@MitchBurns7 жыл бұрын
KuraIthys I have a feeling the triforce was just 3 triangles put together to form a bigger triangle with and upside down triangle between them.
@trueverdicts6855 жыл бұрын
The second paper was so well phrased. So short yet so clear..
@ashoka93067 жыл бұрын
watson and crick establishing the shape of dna with 800 words.