61–70 of 90 posts
"The Letter S" by Donald E. Knuth. An entire paper on the typographical design of the letter S and variants based on type size and other attributes. An elegant paper on a single letter: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF03023051#page-1
It is a sad tragedy that this article is not freely available on the web (at least as I can find).
I'm not quite sure what's meant by "scholary papers", but I really enjoy(ed) Fielding's Ph.d thesis on "REST": http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm Mostly because, it's not actually about just REST, but the way he derives REST as a reasonable approach to architect hypermedia/hypertext "applications" (In quotes, because, he's not really talking about "web apps" -- he mentions some other patterns…
The REST thesis, whatever merit it may otherwise have, is also a prime example of the academic style of writing going horribly wrong, though. You could communicate the important novel points of this text in 5-10 pages of clear prose, instead the thesis goes on and on and bathes in vague generalities, introduces lots of jargon that contributes little and so on. It reads like something from the philosophy department, o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a sad tragedy that this article is not freely available on the web (at least as I can find).
Come on, $39.95 / €34.95 / £29.95 isn't much and I am sure Springer deserve to cash in on Knuth's work.
However, many people here are not going to pay the money or have access through their employer, and will miss out. Free Knuth!
https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www
It's remarkably accessible and clear (at least Part I is).
This paper addressed the question of how galaxies with bridges and tails were formed. It used a series of simulations with gravitationally interacting point masses and associated test particles to represent the disks of two galaxies. It was one of the first papers to convincingly demonstrate that gravitational tidal interactions can create the narrow "tails" seen extending from some galaxies (others had argued that gravity could not make such narrow tails and argued for magetic fields).
This paper also speculated that gravitational interactions between galaxies could result in an increase in the amount of gas at the centers of galaxies and possibly explain the enhanced rate of star formation and supermassive black hole growth seen in some galaxies galaxies.
Claude Shannon 1948, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematical_Theory_of_Commun... This paper kickstarted the concept of information theory, and was hugely influential on many fields of research. Signal-to-noise ratio, the bit, information entropy, etc. are all theories and concepts presented by Shannon.
+1! I find the whole notion of "typical set" to be absolutely amazing. I would like to share with you a few pages from the intro to my thesis which cover Shannon's channel coding theorem. There are some nice TiKZ illustrations. http://minireference.com/static/excerpts/Shannon_channel_cod... (it's not super detailed, but the definitions of all the moving parts are given)
in case somebody is interested in more than the 15 pages provided in the excerpt, here's ivan's complete thesis:
Very nice intro to type systems.
"A Language-based Approach to Unifying Events and Threads" (Peng Li, Steve Zdancewic) http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~stevez/papers/LZ06b.pdf
For showing that if you have a sufficiently powerful programming language, the answer to the question "async events or multiple threads?" can be "the best of both worlds".
"The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls" (James Bessen, Jennifer Ford, Michael Meurer) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1930272
If you ever wondered exactly how much wealth is destroyed by the US patent system, this paper provides some educated guesstimates.
http://www.protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v69/pdf/bc...
Funny and inspirational, and shows how primitive a lot of biological research really is: Almost randomly try a bunch of things and take note of anything that has any effect. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The REST thesis, whatever merit it may otherwise have, is also a prime example of the academic style of writing going horribly wrong, though. You could communicate the important novel points of this text in 5-10 pages of clear prose, instead the thesis goes on and on and bathes in vague generalities, introduces lots of jargon that contributes little and so on. It reads like something from the philosophy department, o…
Everyone I know with a PhD has a 10-page journal article they recommend you read instead of the thesis. For whatever reason, this is the way PhD theses tend to work these days.
P.W. Anderson, "More is different", https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_differen...
R. B. Laughlin and D. Pines, "The theory of everything", http://www.pnas.org/content/97/1/28.full.pdf&embedded=true