From Real Clear Science, January 9:
"What is the greatest scientific paper ever published?"
Taken as worded, this is clearly an impossible question to
conclusively answer, so we'll start by defining what exactly makes a
paper "great."
Tony Padilla, an associate professor of physics at the University of Nottingham, provided
a beautifully simple criterion in a recent episode of Numberphile:
"impact per word." A short paper that was highly influential.
By that definition of "greatness" (which is, of course, open to
debate) the best scientific paper ever written was probably John Nash's "Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games", published in January of 1950 to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In just 333 words, Nash, then a 21-year-old graduate student at Princeton, outlined what became the cornerstone principle of game theory: the Nash equilibrium.
Nash would further elucidate the concept in his doctoral dissertation, published a year later. In essence, it states
that in any competitive game or scenario, equilibrium is achieved when
all of the players are making their best choices, whilst taking into
account the strategies of all the other players. Motorists obeying
traffic signals and driving on the right side of the road are two
real-world examples of Nash equilibria. Nash demonstrated mathematically
that these equilibria exist in any competitive situation with a finite
number of players and strategies....MORE
