Gmail's webclips feature alerted me to the availability of Edmund Landau's PhD thesis in English translation. The thesis is 13 pages, which is substantially shorter than any PhD thesis in CS I am aware of.
I suspect that PhD theses in mathematics are, by and large, shorter than those in TCS. What is the shortest PhD thesis in either subject you are aware of? (In the case of mathematics, let's restrict ourselves to modern times, but if anyone knows of a thesis that is shorter than Landau's I'd be interested in knowing the details.)
Here is my own contribution. Off the top of my head, I recall that Jay Loren Gischer's PhD thesis from Stanford (year: 1984; topic: the theory of pomsets; supervisor: Vaughan Pratt, see also here) was between 45- and 50-page long.
7 comments:
I believe Gary Miller's thesis was quite short and brilliant. Not quite sure how short but I believe around 30 pages.
John Nash's thesis is about 26 pages long...
i added a link to this post on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007029)
Thanks
helwr
Burt Totaro's PhD was apparently 13 pages.
I visit this blog so many time,and every time i get some new tips and ideas from your blog, great work.
_______________
I think mathematics phd thesis can really be hard to write as you need to be more on practice than on writing. And their thesis topics ideas can really be a little bit complicated to understand. Anyway, I think publishing the thesis online can really help a lot of people on the same field.
Post a Comment