Camille Paglia’s first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), was an adaptation of her 1974 doctoral dissertation at Yale, Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art.
It was reviewed in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Times Literary Supplement — and became a bestseller.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s PhD thesis became the bestselling book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. It has its critics and faults, but is nevertheless a landmark work in Holocaust history.
There may not be a single PhD paper that’s the most famous, but arguably there may only be one Master’s thesis that is famous. Claude Shannon’s which described how digital circuits could implement Boolean logic; in other words how an electronic digital computer could be built. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any other master’s thesis that is as near as well-known as that one.
There seems to be some misunderstanding of the nature of doctoral dissertations in this thread (which has been largely addressed by Kimstu, Chronos and others).
Jumping in with experience from my own field of experimental physics, it is fairly rare for original research to be published first as a dissertation. In the course of four to eight years of graduate school, a successful student will publish several peer-reviewed journal articles and be first author on one or more. This work will eventually make it into the student’s dissertation, but it will not appear there first. A dissertation is typically the most complete record of the theory, methods, and results of the research (outside of inscrutable lab notebooks), and colleagues or competitors who wish to understand or replicate the research will typically read about it in students’ dissertations.
Consider, as an example, a dissertation about some moderately famous work that was enthusiastically described in the popular press at the time: the first observation of Bose-Einstein condensate. I believe that this is the first dissertation in which the work was described, and it was completed in 1998. The initial observation of BEC was in 1995, and many papers were published on the subject in the intervening years. The student who wrote this thesis was the second author on the 1995 paper describing the initial observation, after a postdoctoral researcher. The two faculty members who lead the group were the last two authors on that paper.
Those who said that a dissertation advisor will be quick to take credit for ideas from students also have it wrong, at least in my experience. Academic research is a collaboration between students, postdocs and faculty, and the names of all participating collaborators will appear in the author list. A student who is primarily responsible for the research will nearly always be first author. Tradition holds that the professor who leads the group is usually listed last.
Drexler’s dissertation on nanotechnology was supposedly the first on the subject, and is mentioned by people in the field.
His Ph.D. work was the first doctoral degree on the topic of molecular nanotechnology and (after some editing) his thesis, “Molecular Machinery and Manufacturing with Applications to Computation,” was published as “Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation” (1992), which received the Association of American Publishers award for Best Computer Science Book of 1992.
eh? It’s absolutely commonplace - student who did the (most) work goes first, PI goes last. And whilst this ordering of names is common, but not uniformly observed, in chemistry publications, it’s practically the law in biology.
I’m sure you know this, so maybe you mistook Chronos’ post to refer to students publishing papers as the only author, without the PI’s name at all. I agree that this is unheard of in a laboratory-intensive discipline like chemistry, I’ve never seen this happen. I’ve seen a few examples where the PhD student has been starred as the corresponding author, along with the PI. Presumably because they’ve had an idea that is outside the interests of the PI and been left to get on with it.
Kate Millett. Sexual Politids.
Would this generalization also hold true for theoretical (not applied) physics?
How about mathematics, sociology, history, English, etc?
In computer science, many ideas are first mentioned in the dissertation – although most people are not familiar with them. (Claude Shannon’s thesis may be an outlier. Wikipedia mentions that William Poundstone called it “the most important master’s thesis of all time.” However, no PhD thesis I’m aware of has been characterized as such – yet.)
Lars Onsager submitted his PhD thesis to the Norwegian Institute of Technology in the 1920s, in the area of thermodynamics (reciprocal relationships in non-equilibrium systems). Regrettably, the thesis was found to be somewhat below the level required for an advanced degree at that institution, and no PhD was granted.
Onsager went on to a stellar career as a theoretician in the physical sciences and subsequently won the 1968 Nobel prize in chemistry for, you guessed it, his work on reciprocal relationships in non-equilibrium systems 
But the “reformatting by a publisher” is exactly how the “leaking out into the public sphere” happens, and how it’s designed to happen. (And it doesn’t always take much waiting, either; as noted upthread, publication of dissertation results can coincide with or even precede submission of the dissertation.)
I’m still not seeing why this would seem strange, but I’m probably just being dense about the point you’re making.
Quite honestly, I’m not certain what I was thinking since, looking at my resume, I am first author on two papers, and a third may or may not ever get published. I graduated, and really have no desire to edit it.
I am an example of research that was published in my dissertation first. I think this isn’t as uncommon as you might think though. For one chapter, it was simply that the research was being wrapped up as my defense was approaching. Even if we had submitted it as is right then, it would have been many months before it ever appeared in a journal. The other chapter wont get published because it is mainly about a bunch of interesting things that happened, but were basically unpublishable. Ironically, I consider that stuff to be the most interesting and potentially groundbreaking, but nobody has the money to burn platinum group metals like that.
Sorry for not explaining better. Let me try some more examples…
Diaries are not intended to be read known and read by millions. And yet, the public is aware of The Diaries of Anne Frank.
Papers posted on bulletin boards and doors are typically obscure notices that end up in the trash within a week. And yet, we are aware of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses.
Paintings commissioned for homes are typically a dime-a-dozen. There have been thousands of them we’ve never seen. And yet, we are aware of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
The examples above all had “barriers” that would typically prevent them from being known – but somehow, some way, they became famous.
Therefore, it would seem that by now, at least one PhD dissertation would have had the unusual combination of groundbreaking ideas + unorthodox circumstances that would make it familiar to the public. I was surprised that no such animal exists – yet. Maybe Chief Pedant’s mention of Martin Luther King’s thesis is currently the best example – unfortunately for the wrong reasons.
Well, I think there have been a lot of examples in this thread that satisfy your criteria. Perhaps you are disappointed that the works are not referred to as “Dissertation of John Smith” but rather are known under an artistic title, or in other cases, the subject matter of the thesis is famous and/or commercially important, but it is not popularly known that the subject matter was included in a doctoral dissertation.
As has been mentioned regarding other fields, in biology it is pretty much the default that the chapters of your thesis are published before your doctoral thesis, usually as several independent research papers. Usually, it’s important to publish work as soon as it’s ready to go out the door, rather than wait until you have a large enough body of work to write a whole thesis. In some cases, even the introductory chapter is published on its own as a review article that summarizes and analyzes the history and current snapshot of research in your field. Even if all of the chapters in your thesis are published as seminal works, almost no one is going to sit down and read a thesis from beginning to end, and they are not really intended to be read as such.
I don’t have an opinion on the most important PhD thesis, but there is a strong candidate for the most important Master’s Thesis of all time: Claude Shannon’s implementation of Boolean algebra using relays. This basically invented digital logic and led directly to computers and most of the stuff we have today. The professor of my first digital logic class at MIT, who was a pretty famous guy himself, handed out the paper based on it the first day of class.
I will add two points.
First, that research is primarily about discovering new knowledge, not about creating a written document. The writing, printing, and publishing is largely a necessary evil (except in some humanities fields).
Second, about whether the student or the advisor gets credit for a breakthough by the student. I agree this varies tremendously by field, and I would expect it to vary based on how “hardware-intensive” the research is. If the student is examining texts or running psych experiments on undergrads, the student can work fairly independently. If the student’s breakthrough comes from physcial or life science experiments using equipment that is only available because the advisor brought in millions of dollars in grant money to establish a lab, it’s a little less clear to me that the student should be entitled to publish that as sole author.
You’re like the third or fourth person to point that out in this thread. However, it is still freaking awesome. I named my first son Maxwell, but if I ever have another, he’s probably going to be named Claude Shannon.
You’re making a faulty analogy. Dissertations themselves might not be read very often, but the information in them can and does get published in other venues. For example, the material in my dissertation made its way into a full dozen different papers (of varying quality, I admit), published both before and after the dissertation was finished.
Not all PhD students publish bit of their thesis, but I don’t think its exactly unusual. And, certainly, if you’re looking for truly astounding PhD research, wouldn’t that be most likely to be published in another venue?
So, to correct your analogy: If The Diary of Anne Frank had been edited and serialized in the Saturday Evening Post under the name “Anne and the Horrors of War” – and if, in fact, most diaries were edited and published in weekly magazines – then diaries would be analagous to PhD dissertations. But they’re not.
Peter Debye’s doctoral thesis on radiation pressure is well-known.
If you’re looking for famous theses, some Ph.D. theses and Master’s theses in the social sciences have, in fact, been published as books. I’ve got at least one of these that I used in my own researches. Probably the most famous of these – and one well-known to non-specialists as well – is Carlos Castaneda’s Master’s thesis, which was republished as The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, and became a best seller. I’d say that’s the winner for this thread, except that it’s not a Ph.D. thesis. (Castaneda did get a Ph.D., and his later books are based on that material, but I don’t think any of those books are identical to the thesis. Teachings ends with an outline of analysis that is a positive pain to try to work through – Richard DeMille calls it a “literary cactus ball” – and it seems way out of place in a popular book. DeMille claims the publisher didn’t want to include it, but Castaneda insisted.)
Of course, I don’t believe a word of Castaneda’s thesis, but that’s another thread (and one we’ve already hashed through.)
Seems like you misinterpreted my analogy in a backwards way.
So educate me: explain how diaries are analagous to dissertations.
I’m having the same problem Kimstu has, in that what you think is surprising seems natural to me.
In the analogies, I was trying to emphasize the “barriers” to becoming famous. The analogy wasn’t about comparing content to content. It was comparing original intentions of the work to NOT be published.
Yes, PhD research work is not intended for public consumption. That’s true.
Personal diaries are also not intended for public consumption. Also true. And yet, we have several diaries that have trickled into public consciousness.
What’s surprising is that in the course of random human events over the last 200 years of PhD dissertations, there hasn’t been one that’s bubbled up to the top into public awareness. Yes, it would take a very unusual set of circumstances for that to happen, but it seems like statistically, the sample size of thousands of PhD dissertations is large enough for one to exist by now.