Post Reopened by KConrad, Hailong Dao, Gil Kalai, Andy Putman, François G. Dorais
Post Closed as "not a real question" by Andres Caicedo, Mark Meckes, Ryan Budney, Dan Petersen, Andreas Thom
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# FirstEarly Two-Author Math PaperPapers

The middle of the twentieth-century featured several famous papers with two authors. For example, Eilenberg and Mac Lane's papers introducing categories and Eilenberg-MacLane spaces appeared in 1945. The Feit-Thompson Odd Order Theorem appeared in 1962. Atiyah and Singer published their index theorem in 1963.

I can't think of any important papers with two or more authors before the Eilenberg-Mac Lane collaboration, which could just be a lacuna in my historical knowledge. My question is: what is are the first math paper papers with two or more authors? (A subsidiary question is: why were collaborations so rare before that?)

Post Reopened by Mark Sapir, Georges Elencwajg, Emerton, Allen Knutson, Pete L. Clark
Post Closed as "subjective and argumentative" by Hailong Dao, Andrew Stacey, J.C. Ottem, Todd Trimble, José Figueroa-O'Farrill
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