Maybe I’m ignorant but it seems like no PhD paper has become famous enough to enter public awareness. Why is that?
For example, many people know Einstein got his Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. But neither photoelectric effect nor relativity was the subject of his PhD paper. Einstein’s PhD dissertation was, “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions”
Has any major invention, breakthrough, or quotable soundbite come from anybody’s PhD paper in the last 200 years?
It seems strange since graduate students spend several years of blood, sweat & tears to write it. You’d think by now, after tens of thousands submitted papers, there would be several printed gems to point to.
Or is the constraint of “PhD paper” too restrictive? For example, maybe there was a very famous book but that book was 95% recycled from the author’s PhD paper? Therefore the dissertation was really just a “rough draft.” In this case, the PhD paper did have the landmark ideas. However, I can’t even think of one example of this scenario.
I didn’t find any obvious answers on this topic with google search.
The first example to come to mind is de Broglie, whose thesis outlined the revolutionary idea of wave-particle duality as applied to electrons, one of the founding ideas of quantum mechanics. It’s also remarkable for being extremely short (I’ve heard something in the vicinity of three pages), that being all the space he needed to demonstrate the utility of his idea. All theorists aspire to be able to get off that easily, but of course, opportunities for such a simple yet revolutionary idea don’t come up very often.
I don’t know if it’s the “most famous” (or how you’d determine that), but Louis De Broglie’s PhD dissertation formed the basis for his Nobel Prize in physics a mere five years later.
Thank you both for mentioning de Broglie. However, I was hoping for something more well known (if that’s possible). I’m sure you’ll agree that virtually nobody outside of academia would know who de Broglie is.
If de Broglie’s paper truly is the most well-known, it seems like everybody’s PhD paper has been going into a black hole!
Karl Marx is known for his writings after his PhD paper. Same can be said for many other scientists, philosophers, etc.
Nobody seems to be doing their best life’s work in their PhD dissertation. Amazing. You’d think somebody somewhere would have had a untimely car accident and the last thing they wrote (their PhD paper) was the most brilliant thing the world had ever seen.
It’s called a dissertation, not a ‘PhD paper’ or some such. Also, I suspect that most dissertations don’t exactly become ‘famous’ because virtually all academic writing remains well under the radar of public interest. However, within every academic discipline I’m certain there are seminal works that were (parts of a) dissertations (and were maybe re-published in a different form later on or as articles earlier on).
How about Jane Goodall, whose work on Chimpanzees started in 1960 and was the basis for her Ph.D. thesis in 1965, by which time she had already been featured in National Geographic?
Have pulsars entered the public consciousness, or buckyballs? Both were discovered by graduate students, although the Nobel Prize went to their thesis advisors.
Remember, dissertations are written by students, who probably still aren’t well enough trained to come up with scientific breakthroughs.
However, if we consider non-science, there was John F. Kennedy’s senior thesis, While England Slept, which was later published and helped him make his reputation. Not a Ph.D. thesis, of course, but still student work.
It’s not famous (probably not even among his fans), but I read Robert B. Parker’s Ph.D. thesis, The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality, and it gave great insight into his work.
I would go with John Nash. His 28 (!) page dissertation laid the foundation for Nash Equlibiria, and his subsequent Nobel Prize. He’s also famous in a way that de Broglie isn’t.
I think Svante Arrhenius was initially given a very low level for his dissertation on ionic solutions. That’s the theory he received the Nobel prize for in 1903. It is only famous among chemists though.
It’s strange that Arrhenius work is so often used, but almost no one knows who he is. If only his equation boiled down to something simple like E=MC^2.
This is a different question from whether any “PhD paper” (aka, doctoral dissertation) is famous outside the consciousness of academia. I think it’s still rarely the case that doctoral dissertations achieve the level of importance of later work, but I don’t really know anything. I can think of a few notable results from doctoral dissertations, but they’re only notable within the fields which produced them (e.g., Goedel’s completeness theorem, far overshadowed in public consciousness by his later incompleteness theorems, or Lawvere’s creation of functorial semantics, which no one knows anything about except those few who care about categorical logic.) [I’ve also heard it put that the most famous master’s thesis of all time, indeed the only one I’ve ever heard anyone talk about, is Claude Shannon’s on the applications of Boolean algebra to circuit design. But who knows? Maybe in some other field they talk about another one. Either way, clearly, these aren’t things with general cultural cachet] [Also, it’s interesting to note that Turing’s great breakthrough and most famous work (on plain-vanilla Turing machines) was two years before his dissertation, his dissertation being a further development of new ideas on top of that]
I venture right now that the most famous work ever used as a doctoral dissertation is Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is probably his most famous work and actually does have, I believe, a fair level of cultural recognition outside the ivory tower. Can anyone beat that?
Maybe Ed Catmull, who later went on to co-found Pixar?
From Wikipedia - During his time [in grad school] he made three fundamental computer graphics discoveries: Z-buffering (independently from Wolfgang Straßer who described it 8 months before Catmull in his PhD thesis), texture mapping, and bicubic patches, and invented algorithms for anti-aliasing and refining subdivision surfaces.
Yes I know. It’s simply a sloppy habit of description I developed. My friend spent 5+ years on his PhD and whenever it came up in discussion, it was the “PhD paper.”
Part of the reason for the comparative obscurity of actual Ph.D. dissertations is that they are generally not published as peer-reviewed research in dissertation form (at least not in the US, and I’m not aware of major exceptions to that practice elsewhere).
A dissertation is supervised by one’s graduate advisor, reviewed and evaluated by one’s dissertation committee, and then submitted to (and, with luck, accepted by) one’s university in partial fulfillment of the Ph.D. requirements. (Other Ph.D. requirements include completing the necessary coursework and paying one’s tuition bills.) The dissertation then goes into the university library and/or archives, and is usually incorporated into the University Microfilm/ProQuest database for general access, but doesn’t automatically show up as a regular research article or monograph.
People who want to publish their dissertation research have to revise the format (and sometimes the content) of the dissertation to conform to the requirements of a publisher or a journal editor. It’s usually the published form of the work that gets cited by other research and becomes famous.
For instance, Einstein is well known for, among other things, the three major scientific papers he published in his annus mirabilis or year of breakthroughs, 1905. A lot of people could probably tell you that those papers were on the topics of light quanta, special relativity, and Brownian motion, but probably many of them don’t know that the third paper was actually just a slightly revised form of Einstein’s recently-accepted doctoral dissertation.
Ph.D. dissertations (or theses as they are known in the U.K) are not normally published. Indeed, until fairly recently, when some have begun to be made available on the web, they were quite difficult to get hold of. They usually existed in only 2 or three copies, one kept by the author (authors might make extra copies, but typing, copying and binding would all be at their own expense) and another one or two kept in the library of the awarding institution, often locked away in the vaults somewhere. Somebody at that institution could ask to have a look at it, if they knew it was there. They would not stumble across it on the open shelves or, probably, in the main catalog. If you were based somewhere else you might be able to get it by interlibrary loan (which might cost you, and you can’t keep them for long), or you might have to travel to the library where it was kept. When I was doing my own doctoral research I did need to get a few other people’s theses on interlibrary loan. Sometimes they came as rather dogeared photocopies of the original, sometimes as microfilm, and once I got a bound copy.
However, the material in a Ph.D. dissertation very often will be published, either as a book (usually at least somewhat rewritten) or as a series of scholarly journal articles. This the route through which doctoral research has most of its impact, but readers will usually either not know or not care that it originated as dissertation work.
Upon looking it up, I guess I was thinking of his “Habilitationsvortrag” (probationary lecture), in which he laid some of the foundations for non-Euclidean geometry that was, if I understand correctly, of key importance to relativity. But it turns out his dissertation was pretty important, too.
This is true but I was thinking there were dissertations so brilliant that they rose above the walls of academia.
We read Emily Dickinson’s poems that were written scraps of paper left behind in her house. (But to your point, they weren’t famous until submitted for publishing by her sister.)
We read Aristotle’s works even though they are second-hand notes by his students.
We can think of many quotes from Shakespeare’s plays or Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations.”
I think each of the examples above show how the author’s work transcended its original form.
And yes, dissertations are written by young 25-year old students. However, Mary Shelley was younger than 20 when she wrote Frankenstein and the public is familiar with that (though these days, probably the movies more than the book.)
It strikes me as odd that not a single dissertation in the last 200 years, even though it is formal (not scraps of paper and not 2nd-hand student notes), and has heavy time investment (not just the 2 years Mary Shelley to write her novel) has not made its way into a high school class as assigned reading material or general public awareness. (Again, I know it’s not the purpose of the doctoral dissertation to become high school reading material (especially the non-mathematic ones) but the original purpose of Shakespeare wasn’t to be high school material either.)
Perhaps we’re just 1000 years premature for that situation to happen.