Question

My vote would be Milnor's 7-page paper "On manifolds homeomorphic to the 7-sphere", in Vol. 64 of Annals of Math. For those who have not read it, he explicitly constructs smooth 7-manifolds which are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to the standard 7-sphere.

What do you think?

Note: If you have a contribution, then (by definition) it will be a paper worth reading so please do give a journal reference or hyperlink!

Edit: To echo Richard's comment, the emphasis here is really on short papers. However I don't want to give an arbitrary numerical bound, so just use good judgement...

Answer 1

Serre's GAGA isn't as short as some of the others, but it's still just over 40 pages (which is quite short by the standards of Serre/Grothendieck-style algebraic geometry at the time -- e.g. FAC is about 80 pages, and of course there are things like EGA...), and it's still GAGA.

Answer 2

Two fundamental papers in computational complexity theory and the theory of formal languages are very short:

• Neil Immerman, Nondeterministic space is closed under complementation, SIAM Journal on Computing 17(5), 935–938, 1988 (four pages);

• Róbert Szelepcsényi, The method of forcing for nondeterministic automata, Bulletin of the EATCS 33, 96–100, 1987 (five pages).

Both papers independently prove what is now called the Immerman-Szelepcsényi theorem, i.e., that nondeterministic space complexity classes are closed under complement, and in particular that context-sensitive languages are closed under complement. The authors shared the Gödel Prize in 1995 for their result.

I’ve never read Szelepcsényi’s version, but Immerman’s is so short and sweet that I found it hard to believe at first that it actually works as a proof of such an important theorem.

Answer 3

Lawvere's paper "Quantifiers and sheaves" (1970 International Congress of Mathematicians at Nice, vol. 1, pp. 329--334) was the first publication of his work with Tierney on elementary topoi. It contains an amazing amount of information in just 6 pages.

More generally, the writings of Bill Lawvere have the highest theorem/sentence ratio I've seen (though Leonid Levin comes pretty close).

Answer 4

The paper "Zum Hilbertschen Nullstellensatz" (Mathematische Annalen, vol. 102, page 520, 1930) in which Rabinowitsch (aka. Rainich) introduced his famous trick is one small page long - the body consists of just 13 lines!

The paper consists of a slick proof of the Nullstellensatz, but the usefulness of the trick of course goes beyond that, e.g. it is used to show that $GL_n$ is an affine algebraic group...

Answer 5

A. Karatsuba and Yu. Ofman (1962). "Multiplication of Many-Digital Numbers by Automatic Computers". Proceedings of the USSR Academy of Sciences 145: 293–294.

Proved that multiplication of n-digit numbers could be done in less than quadratic time (thus dsproving a conjecture by Kolmogorov) and provided the first divideand-conquer algorithm for arithmetic.

Answer 6

Erdös' 1947 paper ``Some remarks on the theory of graphs'', which is just 3 pages long, gives the lower bound $R(k,k)>2^{k/2}$ for the diagonal Ramsey numbers. It could have been a much shorter paper; he completes the proof of the lower bound before the end of the first page!

The paper is important not just for the bound, which (essentially) hasn't been improved in 65 years, but also for the method used; although this paper wasn't the first to use the probabilistic method, it is certainly the most influential early paper to have done so.

P. Erdös, Some remarks on the theory of graphs, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 53 (1947) 292-294

Answer 7

The little paper by John McKay on Graphs, singularities, and finite groups is a nice example.

Graphs, singularities, and finite groups. The Santa Cruz Conference on Finite Groups (Univ. California, Santa Cruz, Calif., 1979), pp. 183--186, Proc. Sympos. Pure Math., 37, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, R.I., 1980.

Answer 8

The so called "Weil conjectures" are in the last pages of André Weil's short paper in 1949, "Numbers of solutions of equations in finite fields", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 55: 497–508. They probably were around before though.

Answer 9

L. Euler Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinentis, Commentarii academiae scientiarum Petropolitanae 8, 1741, pp. 128-140.

was the famous Bridges of Königsberg paper. It was the beginning of both topology and graph theory. It is translated into English in Newman's "World of Mathematics" and in Biggs, Lloyd & Wilson's "Graph Theory 1736-1936". In Opera Omnia it is 10 pages long.

Answer 10

My favourite is the following tiny, self-contained article:

"Uniform equivalence between Banach Spaces" by Israel Aharoni & Joram Lindenstrauss, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 84, Number 2, March 1978, pp.281-283.

http://www.ams.org/bull/1978-84-02/S0002-9904-1978-14475-9/S0002-9904-1978-14475-9.pdf

(in which the authors prove that there exist two non-isomorphic Banach spaces that are Lipschitz homeomorphic.)

Answer 11

The paper by Ron Graham and Bruce Rothschild which gives a really short proof (involving a complicated triple induction) of van der Waerden's theorem:

R.L. Graham and B.L. Rothschild, A short proof of van der Waerden's theorem on arithmetic progressions, Proc. American Math. Soc. 42(2) 1974, 385–386.

http://www.ams.org/journals/proc/1974-042-02/S0002-9939-1974-0329917-8/S0002-9939-1974-0329917-8.pdf

Answer 12

"Singularities of 2-spheres in 4-space" by Fox and Milnor. Ten pages which generated hundreds of papers in knot theory.

http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=euclid.ojm/1200691730

Answer 13

I know that this question was posted almost two years ago but I cannot resist suggesting

Zagier, D. Newman's short proof of the prime number theorem. Amer. Math. Monthly 104 (1997), no. 8, 705–708.

which is difficult to beat, I think.

Answer 14

Perelman's ``Proof of the soul conjecture of Cheeger and Gromoll.'' J. Differential Geom. 40 (1994), no. 1, 209–212,

http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=euclid.jdg/1214455292

is, at 3 pages (plus a paragraph of remarks), a favourite of mine, although it has some pretty tough competition here.

Answer 15

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet, but Rostislav Grigorchuk's 1980 paper in which he constructs the Grigorchuk group is just under two pages:

On the Burnside problem on periodic groups, Funkts. Anal. Prilozen. 14, No 1 (1980) 53-54.

At the time, no one realized the full significance of this group, but some of the more remarkable properties are proven in the paper.

Answer 16

Drinfeld and Simpson's B-Structures on G-Bundles and Local Triviality, Mathematical Research Letters 2, 823-829 (1995) comes in at under seven pages and has been quite important in all the work done on principal G-bundles (such as the geometric Langlands' program).

In particular, it proved the double quotient description of G-bundles on curves (for reductive G) which had previously only been proved for $G = SL_n$ by Beauville and Laszlo.

The paper can be found here.

Answer 17

I think this is the shortest paper (1 page) with the most large title in combinatorics (24 words!):

"Alexander Burstein's Lovely Combinatorial Proof of John Noonan's Beautiful Formula that the number of $n$-permutations that contain the Pattern $321$ Exactly Once Equals $(3/n)(2n)!/((n-3)!(n+3)!)$"

by Doron Zeilberger, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.4379 .

Answer 18

What about Atiyah's K-theory and Reality? I know it's not that short with its 20 pages, but if you see the paper, you notice that he didn't use his space very economically. He did provide the foundation of topological K-theory though.

Answer 19

Cooley and Tukey (re)invented the Fast Fourier Transform with a 5-page paper in Mathematics of Computation (1965).

Answer 20

Évariste Galois, "Mémoire sur les conditions de résolubilité des équations par radicaux". I believe it's about 18 pages, but the foundations of Galois theory are contained within the first few pages.

Answer 21

What about Ribet's great Inventiones paper from the 70's $\textit{A modular construction of unramified }p\textit{-extensions of }\mathbf{Q}(\mu_p)$? I think it should be mentioned!

Answer 22

What about Selberg's 1947 paper?

Answer 23

A favourite of mine is Kobayashi and Wu's 4 page Annals paper "On holomorphic sections of certain Hermitian vector bundles" where they introduce the Bochner-method, which is nowadays used everywhere in differential geometry as an easy and effective method of proving vanishing results.

Answer 24

This should be a comment in regards to the answer of A One-Sentence Proof That Every Prime p≡1(mod4) Is a Sum of Two Squares D. Zagier , but I don't have the reputation. While it isn't the actual paper, there is a short but interesting note that goes through how such an involution is constructed in the first result of a google search here.