The purpose of this poster/site is to portal papers that were written that punctured the equilibrium of the otherwise relatively steady pace of scientific and engineering research.

They are more or less in chronological order with a brief description of the work and a link to a pdf version (coming when I have more disk space).

Tier I

1848: George Boole. "The Calculus of Logic" Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal, Vol. III (1848), pp. 183–98. Paper outlining what is now known as Boolean Logic.

1865: Maxwell, James Clerk, "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 155, 459-512. This paper presented the original set of eight Maxwell's equations governing electromagnetism.

1936: Turing, A.M., "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. The first paper in computer science dealing with notions of computability.

1948: Claude E. Shannon, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". Bell System Technical Journal. This paper introduces the notions of information and entropy.

1949: J. Bardeen and W. H. Brattain, "Physical Principles Involved in Transistor Action". Bell System Technical Journal and Physical Review. This paper was the first to describe a transistor affect.  (Not without controversy)

1960: R. E. Kalman, "A New Approach to Linear Filtering and Prediction Problems", Transactions of the ASME--Journal of Basic Engineering. This paper introduced the Kalman filter for estimation of signals in conditions of uncertainty.

1963: Lorenz, E. N., "Deterministic nonperiodic flow". Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. Initial paper illustrating chaotic behavior from deterministic equations.

1967: A. J. Viterbi, "Error Bounds for Convolutional Codes and an Asymptotically Optimum Decoding Algorithm," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory ". First description of the Viterbi Decoder currently used in over 1 billion cell phones.

1967: Benoît Mandelbrot,  "How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension". Science. This paper popularized fractals and non-Euclidean geometry.

1971: Stephen A. Cook, "The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures", This paper provided the first NPC problem, boolean satisfiability. Resolving the question does P=NP is a Clay institute millennium prize problem.

1974: Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication", IEEE Transactions on Communications, This paper presents some of the early thinking concerning Internet protocols.

1976: Robert M. Metcalfe and David R. Boggs, "Ethernet: Distributed Packet-Switching For Local Computer Networks.", Communications of the ACM. The first paper that presents Ethernet as a LAN technology. (Is this a seminal paper?)

1983: Kirkpatrick, S., C. D. Gelatt Jr., M. P. Vecchi, "Optimization by Simulated Annealing",Science. Simulated Annealing is introduced as a practical Monte Carlo optimization algorithm. (Perhaps this should be Metropolis et al.)

1987: L.  Greengard and V. Rokhlin, "A Fast Algorithm for Particle Simulations",  J. Comput. Phys., Introduced algorithms to speed up computation by transforming a cluster into a simpler representation which is used to compute its influence on objects at large distances, (N-body problems).


Tier II

1950: R. Hamming, "Error Detecting and Correcting Codes", The Bell System Technical Journal. This paper built upon Shannon's information theory by introducing error control coding.

1960 I. S. Reed and G. Solomon, "Polynomial Codes Over Certain Finite Fields", SIAM. The first paper to indroduce the mathematics of finite fields to coding.

1960: R.G. Gallager, "Sc.D. thesis, Low Density Parity Check Codes",  M.I.T. Press monograph. LDPC was the first code to allow data transmission rates close to the theoretical maximum.

1963: A.M. Cormack, Representation of a function by its line integrals, with some radiological applications. J Appl Physics; vol. 34, pp.2722-2727 and vol.35, pp. 2908-2913. This paper was one of the first which led to medical imaging algorithms and the development of CT.

1965: James W. Cooley and John W. Tukey, "An algorithm for the machine calculation of complex Fourier series," Mathematics of  Computation. First practical FFT algorithm.

1988: Ingrid Daubechies, "Orthonormal Bases of Compactly Supported Wavelets", Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics. This paper introduced wavelets as basis functions.

1993: Berrou, C., Glavieux, A. and Thitimajshima, P, "Near Shannon Limit error-correcting coding and decoding: Turbo-codes", Proceedings of IEEE International Communications Conference. This paper introdiced a new coding method coming close to the Shannon limit.


Comments:

I have recently divided the collection into two groups. Of these papers I have read 8, understood 5.

Others under consideration include, backprop, fuzzy sets, public-key cryptography, quicksort, simplex method for linear programming and dynamic programming. Other events were often more sociologically (committee) driven  like the Internet and related protocols. 

One amazing thing I have noted in collecting some of these is that some people have actually written more than one seminal paper. The most notable people in this group are Turing and Maxwell.

I also have a suggestion for G. Ohm but haven't found a pdf yet.

There must also be some seminal papers in other areas of Engineering.

If you have suggestions or opinions please e-me at mcleod@ee.umanitoba.ca.