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

J.-C. Yoccoz called

Carl L. Siegel, Iteration of analytic functions, Ann. of Math. 43(2) (1942), 607–612.

a "brief but historic article". In only 6 pages (including all necessary background) Siegel gave the first positive solution to a small denominator problem. This had been a major unsolved issue for over 60 years, and was a big thorn in the side for Poincaré. Siegel's paper is also credited with inspiring Kolmogorov to start the circle of ideas that led to KAM Theory. Buff, Henriksen, and Hubbard did not hesitate in calling it “one of the landmark papers of the twentieth century.”

Details

Answer 2

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 3

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 4

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 5

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

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

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 8

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 9

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 10

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 11

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.

Answer 12

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 13

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 14

Paul Cohen's paper "The independence of the continuum hypothesis" in which he introduced forcing. Six pages long (and another six in the second paper, a year later) that completely changed logic and set theory.

JSTOR access (may require a paywall)

---

While I'm at it, two more in set theory:

Kurt Goedel's proof of the consistency of the continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice, a two pages long paper.

Link to article

And Zermelo's paper introducing the axiom of choice, a three pages long paper proving the well ordering theorem.

Link to article (may require a paywall)

Answer 15

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 16

Kahn and Kalai's, "A counterexample to Borsuk's conjecture" is a 3-page paper which settles a sixty-year-old conjecture with an explicit counterexample in $\mathbb{R}^{1325}$ (and in all sufficiently high dimensions). Although the paper is 3 pages, most of that is background on the problem and references --- the construction itself is only one paragraph.

They include an apt literary quote.

"However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation." —Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Answer 17

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 18

Instead of answering directly about which paper (I don't know), I think that a journal with amazing importance/page ratio was Funktsional. Anal. i ego Prilozhen./Functional analysis and its applications at the time when Gel'fand was the main editor (or Kirillov at some point). Typical paper in 1970-s was of much importance, recognizable names and results nowdays, while being usually something like 4 pages. If one looks at all the volumes in 1970-s together it is just a short interval at a bookshelf, amazing compression of thousands of important results, especially in view of many junk commercial journals nowdays which flag with impact factors like the notorious Chaos, solitons and fractals...

Answer 19

"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 20

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 21

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 22

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 23

The 1958 paper of Kolmogorov entitled "A new metric invariant of transient dynamical systems and automorphisms in Lebesgue spaces" is four pages long. This is the paper in which he defines the entropy of a dynamical system.

Answer 24

Here are two and a half papers in homotopy theory:

1. Dan Kan introduced Kan complexes and the Kan complex approximation functor $\mathrm{Ex}^\infty$ in the three-page 1956 PNAS paper "Abstract Homotopy III" (here is a JSTOR link). I can't resist pointing out his 1958 Trans. Amer. Math Soc. paper "Adjoint Functors"—clearly too long for this contest at 36 pages—where he defines an adjunction of functors on the first page. Here is a link.
2. The 1966 Quart. J. Math. Oxford paper $K$-theory and the Hopf invariant by Adams and Atiyah is only 8 pages long. I don't have a link to the paper, but here is a MathSciNet link. Adams and Atiyah use the Adams operations in $K$-theory to solve the Hopf invariant one problem. Adams' original proof (using secondary operations) takes 85 pages—of course that paper was extraordinarily fecund in homotopy theory.

Answer 25

I'm torn between

Tate, J. Endomorphisms of Abelian Varieties over Finite Fields, Invent Math 2, 1966, p. 134-144

Lubin, Jonathan; Tate, John. Formal complex multiplication in local fields. Ann. of Math. (2) 81 1965 380--387.

and

Drinfelʹd, V. G. Coverings of $p$-adic symmetric domains. (Russian) Funkcional. Anal. i Priložen. 10 (1976), no. 2, 29--40. bearing in mind that, as I recall, the English translation is only 7 pages long.

Longer than some of those above, perhaps; but maybe they win on "importance."

Answer 26

The one-page paper

Golay, Marcel J. E.: "Notes on Digital Coding", Proc. IRE 37, p. 657, 1949,

which introduces the Golay code.

Answer 27

Barry Mazur "On Embeddings of Spheres", Bull. AMS v 65 (1959) only 5 1/2 pages. It introduced the method of infinite repetition in topology and allowed the proof the generalized Schoenflies conjecture.

Answer 28

It's not a paper, and it's not groundbreaking, but it's short!

A One-Sentence Proof That Every Prime $p\equiv 1(\mod 4)$ Is a Sum of Two Squares D. Zagier The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 97, No. 2 (Feb., 1990), p. 144 http://www.jstor.org/pss/2323918

Answer 29

Jannsen, Uwe (1992), "Motives, numerical equivalence and semi-simplicity", Inventions math. 107: 447–452.

Answer 30

Robert Aumann's "Agreeing to Disagree" paper, at 3 pages of length, is one of the most important papers in its field.