What’s the most famous PhD dissertation paper? Is there such a thing?

[KarlGauss]

@Maillard_Duck

I realize that this is something of a digression from the OP’s original question, . . . Apparently, Louis de Broglie’s hypothesis of wave-particle duality was first published in his doctoral dissertation in 1924. . .

I don’t want to sound too officious, but after reading the OP did you read of any of the posts, especially the first two?

[Jamaika_a_jamaikaiake]

@Maillard_Duck

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.

If I may emphasize a point made by Kimstu:

@Kimstu

In the academic world, where I’ve worked in both humanities and sciences departments for the past twenty years and which is much more diverse and complex than you apparently realize, there are lots of different social models of competition and collaboration.

For example, in mathematics, the authors are generally listed alphabetically. There is no squabbling over “first author.” I’m actually listed first (out of 4) on a paper I did the least work on, and Saharon Shelah is often listed last, even though he has done more work than all of his collaborators put together. (Here’s a list of his 950 papers)

[Bob55]

Ph.D. here. I have a paper in Nature that was important, and it was included in my dissertation along with 2 others, analysis to tie them all together, and future directions. But no one’s going to go try to find my dissertation in the university library to see what I’ve got to say about things, they’ll go to Pubmed or the Nature website. At least in the recent years, dissertations are usually conglomerations of previously-published works, because your promotion in the sciences comes from peer-reviewed publications, not non-peer reviewed dissertations.

[Maillard_Duck]

@KarlGauss

I don’t want to sound too officious, but after reading the OP did you read of any of the posts, especially the first two?

Thanks for pointing that out. I was so excited to have found a piece of relevant information on Wikipedia that I checked only the last page of the thread to see if it had already been posted, thus missing the first few posts. I had read them a couple of days ago but apparently forgot about them. I apologize.

[KarlGauss]

@Maillard_Duck

Thanks for pointing that out. I was so excited to have found a piece of relevant information on Wikipedia that I checked only the last page of the thread to see if it had already been posted, thus missing the first few posts. I had read them a couple of days ago but apparently forgot about them. I apologize.

Nah, no need to apologize. It’s more a reflection of my paranoia that I am on people’s ignore list

[anson2995]

Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Cat’s Cradle” served as his Masters thesis at the University of Chicago. While that’s not an example of a scientific breakthrough, it was a major contribution to 20th century literature. Millions of people have read it, while most of the other theses mentioned here are obscure even within their own fields.

[Indistinguishable]

And has anyone mentioned that Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” similarly served as his Ph.D. thesis at Cambridge, as well as acquiring wide readership and lasting fame?

[Chronos]

In any case, I believe Shannon’s master’s thesis is close to supporting my point. Master’s theses are also not designed to be famous, but Shannon’s graduate paper has started to gain prominence outside the obscure archives of a university microfiche library.

On the other hand, part of the reason Shannon’s thesis is so famous is precisely the fact that it was a Master’s thesis. The work in it is of sufficient quality to be a PhD thesis, so it’s surprising that it was done by a student pursuing the lesser degree, and it’s because of that surprise that it’s so well-remembered.

[Ruken]

@Kimstu

Again, the crux of the matter is that most material embedded in any Ph.D. thesis doesn’t generally reach the public via the Ph.D. thesis itself.

For chemists, the thesis may consist entirely of work that has been already published. The published works are then reformatted to the university’s specifications, stuck one after another as “chapters” that may have little to do with each other, and submitted. Takes 10 days (according to my advisor–mine took longer). My roommate ended up leaving out a chapter from hers because the work hadn’t been published yet.

[Shalmanese]

While not exactly what Ruminator is looking for, there have been quite a number of examples of important scientific theorems which were later discovered to be first formulated in an obscure PhD thesis and then forgotten on a shelf before being independently discovered by the person for whom it is now famously attributed to. So much so that there is even a law named after this effect.

[Ruminator]

@Shalmanese

While not exactly what Ruminator is looking for, … there is even a law named after this effect.

It wasn’t what I was looking for but that’s a great link to a question I wouldn’t have thought to ask.

It also fits in nicely with the loose theme of statistics intuition and guessing.

Another coincidence: by going down the wikipedia hyperlink rabbit holes from your link, one of the detours is a page about Matthew Effect. Lo and behold, an interesting blurb:

“In the sociology of science, “Matthew effect” was a term coined by Robert K. Merton to describe how, among other things, eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if their work is similar; it also means that credit will usually be given to researchers who are already famous.[3][4] For example, a prize will almost always be awarded to the most senior researcher involved in a project, even if all the work was done by a graduate student.”

…which echoes what Chief Pedant said earlier.

Or maybe many of us are just reaffirming “group think” and don’t even realize it.

[jbaker]

I’m going to go with Marie Curie’s dissertation, Recherches sur les substances radioactives, for which she was awarded the D.Sc. in 1903 and shared the Nobel Prize in physics the same year. I think that meets the OP’s standards.