Over the last few decades, we have been gifted with knowledge from some of the brightest minds in the world who played a vital role in the advancement of human civilisation. Their research papers containing their unique findings changed the world as we know it.
In different fields of knowledge especially in science and technology, there have been some phenomenal research papers which everyone should know about. The knowledge from these papers impact our lives to this day, and yet we do not know about most of them.
Here is a short list of such high impact papers:
- "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. This paper was the beginning of the Google search algorithm.
- "Xen and the Art of Virtualization" by Paul Barham, Boris Dragovic, Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Tim Harris, Alex Ho, Rolf Neugebauer, Ian Pratt, and Andrew Warfield.
This paper proposed the idea of lightweight hypervisors. As a result, virtual machine monitors became much more lightweight and is the reason why cloud computing can scale as well as it does today.
- "Experiments in Plant Hybridisation" by Johann Gregor Mendel
This paper contributed to the concepts of traits, specifically that offspring inherit traits from their parents via genes.
- “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits” and “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” by Claude Shannon
The first paper connected Boolean algebra and electronic circuits and the second laid the foundations for information theory, which is the probabilistic method through which we can send and receive digital signals.
- "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" by James Watson and Francis Crick
They found the structure of the molecule DNA that encodes life and figured out how it stores abnormally copious amounts of information to give rise to everything living on this planet
- "The Transistor, A Semi-Conductor Triode" by J. Bardeen and W. H. Brattain
This research paper started the birth of modern electronics.
- "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?" by Albert Einstein
This paper describes the famous equation, E=mc2.
- “Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery” by Joseph Surgery
This paper laid the foundations of modern surgery by introducing sterilization of surgical instruments before cleaning of wounds. This dramatically increased the survival rate of patients.
- “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” by John Maynard Keynes
This paper put forward a theory based upon the notion of aggregate demand to explain variations in the overall level of economic activity.
- “Protein measurement with the folin phenol reagent” by Oliver H. Lowry, Nira J. Rosebrough, A. Lewis Farr, and Rose J. Randall
This paper is the most cited research paper ever in the scientific literature that describes the Lowry protein assay allowing determination of the total level of protein in a solution.
It would take pages to list all the research papers and their underlying inventions that changed the world around us. At our leisure, we can take a look into some of these papers depending on our area of interest and gather valuable knowledge from them.