No Paper Is That Good

Re:No Paper Is That Good by kabouseng on Friday July 13, 2018 @09:25AM (#17522712)

Claude Shannon's paper on information theory [1] is possibly an example of such a paragon of work. No citations, 50 pages of pure awesome, spawned a whole research field of its own and 70 years on just as valid.

[1] A Mathematical Theory of Communication - http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop...

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Re:No Paper Is That Good by eboyjr on Friday July 13, 2018 @09:49AM (#17522945)

You said it. He proposed the model for digital AND analog communication still in use today. Although being a digital software person I admit I've never been motivated to read the part about continuous channels.

I was motivated however to install an archway for my house from the exact shape in Figure 7 (binary entropy function)

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Re:No Paper Is That Good by xurukefi on Friday July 13, 2018 @10:15AM (#17523130)

> No citations

The paper contains citations. But they are hidden in the footnotes - see page 1 or page 5 for example.

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Re:No Paper Is That Good by beagle3 on Friday July 13, 2018 @10:16AM (#17523144)

And it's easily readable with basic math/engineering knowledge. Highly recommended.

Erdos has a few papers that are "that good" as long as you know all the theory leading to the new insight, but none (that I read) are as clear and freestanding as Shannon's AMToC

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Re:No Paper Is That Good by joker3 on Friday July 13, 2018 @05:33PM (#17526909)

Math is different from empirical work. Yes, Shannon's paper is great, but that's not really relevant here because it's in a completely different paradigm.

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Re:No Paper Is That Good by thidr0 on Friday July 13, 2018 @10:00AM (#17523026)

First paper I thought of too.

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