Read the papers that moved physics.

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Classical Mechanics & Dynamics

Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica — I. Newton, 1687. Founded classical mechanics and universal gravitation.
Mecanique Analytique — J. L. Lagrange, 1788. Recast mechanics in variational, coordinate-free form.
On a General Method in Dynamics — W. R. Hamilton, 1834. Introduced the Hamiltonian formulation of mechanics.
Sur le probleme des trois corps et les equations de la dynamique — H. Poincare, 1890. Birth of chaos theory and dynamical systems.
On the Conservation Laws (Invariante Variationsprobleme) — E. Noether, 1918. Symmetries imply conservation laws.
On the Preservation of Conditionally Periodic Motions (KAM) — A. N. Kolmogorov, 1954. Launched KAM theory of stability in Hamiltonian systems.
Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow — E. N. Lorenz, 1963. Discovered the strange attractor and butterfly effect.
Quantitative Universality for a Class of Nonlinear Transformations — M. J. Feigenbaum, 1978. Universal route to chaos via period doubling.
Studies of Nonlinear Problems (FPU) — E. Fermi, J. Pasta, S. Ulam, 1955. Famous numerical experiment on nonlinear lattice dynamics.
Mechanism of Energy Exchange (Solitons in KdV) — N. Zabusky, M. Kruskal, 1965. Discovered the soliton as a stable nonlinear wave.
Geometrical Theory of Diffraction — J. B. Keller, 1962. Extended ray optics to diffraction phenomena.
On the Dynamical Theory of Heat — W. Thomson (Kelvin), 1851. Foundational synthesis of mechanical and thermal dynamics.

Electromagnetism & Optics

A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field — J. C. Maxwell, 1865. Unified electricity, magnetism and light.
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism — J. C. Maxwell, 1873. Canonical formulation of classical electromagnetism.
Ueber sehr schnelle electrische Schwingungen — H. Hertz, 1887. Experimental discovery of electromagnetic waves.
On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies — A. Einstein, 1905. Special relativity from electromagnetism's symmetry.
On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production of Light — A. Einstein, 1905. Light quanta explain the photoelectric effect.
Nobel Lecture: The Wave Nature of the Electron — L. de Broglie, 1929. Matter waves bridge optics and mechanics.
Stimulated Optical Radiation in Ruby (First Laser) — T. H. Maiman, 1960. Reported the first working laser.
Interaction between Light Waves in a Nonlinear Dielectric — J. A. Armstrong et al., 1962. Foundations of nonlinear optics.
Coherent and Incoherent States of the Radiation Field — R. J. Glauber, 1963. Quantum theory of optical coherence.
Inhibited Spontaneous Emission — E. M. Purcell, 1946. Cavity control of emission, the Purcell effect.
Extraordinary Optical Transmission through Sub-wavelength Holes — T. W. Ebbesen et al., 1998. Launched plasmonics and nano-optics.
Negative Refraction Makes a Perfect Lens — J. B. Pendry, 2000. Metamaterials and sub-diffraction imaging.

Thermodynamics & Statistical Mechanics

On the Moving Force of Heat — R. Clausius, 1850. Established the second law and concept of entropy.
Further Studies on the Thermal Equilibrium of Gas Molecules — L. Boltzmann, 1872. H-theorem and kinetic foundation of entropy.
On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances — J. W. Gibbs, 1876. Founded chemical thermodynamics and statistical ensembles.
On the Theory of the Energy Distribution Law of the Normal Spectrum — M. Planck, 1900. Quantization of energy born from blackbody radiation.
Investigations on the Theory of Brownian Movement — A. Einstein, 1905. Linked diffusion to molecular reality.
On the Constitution of Simple Atoms (Bose statistics) — S. N. Bose, 1924. Quantum statistics of photons.
Beitrag zur Theorie des Ferromagnetismus (Ising solution) — E. Ising, 1925. The paradigmatic model of phase transitions.
Crystal Statistics I: Two-Dimensional Ising Model — L. Onsager, 1944. Exact solution proving a phase transition.
Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics — E. T. Jaynes, 1957. Maximum entropy foundation of statistical mechanics.
Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines — N. Metropolis et al., 1953. Invented Monte Carlo sampling.
Scaling Laws for Ising Models Near Tc — L. P. Kadanoff, 1966. Block-spin idea behind the renormalization group.
Nonequilibrium Equality for Free Energy Differences — C. Jarzynski, 1997. Exact relation far from equilibrium.
Self-Organized Criticality — P. Bak, C. Tang, K. Wiesenfeld, 1987. Explained ubiquitous scale-free behavior.

Quantum Mechanics — Foundations

On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules — N. Bohr, 1913. Quantized atomic orbits explaining spectra.
Quantum-Theoretical Re-interpretation of Kinematic Relations — W. Heisenberg, 1925. Birth of matrix mechanics.
Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem — E. Schrodinger, 1926. The wave equation of quantum mechanics.
Uber den anschaulichen Inhalt (Uncertainty Principle) — W. Heisenberg, 1927. Fundamental limits on simultaneous measurement.
The Quantum Theory of the Electron — P. A. M. Dirac, 1928. Relativistic electron and prediction of antimatter.
Can Quantum-Mechanical Description Be Considered Complete? (EPR) — A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, N. Rosen, 1935. Posed the entanglement paradox.
The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics (Cat) — E. Schrodinger, 1935. Introduced entanglement and the cat paradox.
On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox — J. S. Bell, 1964. Inequalities that test local realism.
Proposed Experiment to Test Local Hidden-Variable Theories (CHSH) — J. Clauser, M. Horne, A. Shimony, R. Holt, 1969. Made Bell's test experimentally feasible.
Experimental Test of Bell's Inequalities Using Time-Varying Analyzers — A. Aspect, J. Dalibard, G. Roger, 1982. Closed loopholes confirming quantum nonlocality.
Environment-Induced Superselection Rules (Decoherence) — W. H. Zurek, 1982. Explained the quantum-to-classical transition.
Significance of Electromagnetic Potentials in Quantum Theory — Y. Aharonov, D. Bohm, 1959. The Aharonov-Bohm effect of gauge potentials.
Loophole-free Bell Inequality Violation Using Electron Spins — B. Hensen et al., 2015. Definitive loophole-free test of nonlocality.

Quantum Field Theory & Particle Physics

Space-Time Approach to Quantum Electrodynamics — R. P. Feynman, 1949. Feynman diagrams and modern QED.
On a Relativistically Invariant Formulation of QED — S. Tomonaga, 1946. Independent covariant renormalized QED.
The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman — F. J. Dyson, 1949. Unified the three QED formulations.
Conservation of Isotopic Spin and Isotopic Gauge Invariance — C. N. Yang, R. L. Mills, 1954. Non-abelian gauge theory, basis of the Standard Model.
Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons — P. W. Higgs, 1964. The Higgs mechanism for mass generation.
Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Mesons — F. Englert, R. Brout, 1964. Co-discovery of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism.
A Model of Leptons — S. Weinberg, 1967. Electroweak unification in two pages.
Ultraviolet Behavior of Non-Abelian Gauge Theories — D. J. Gross, F. Wilczek, 1973. Asymptotic freedom and QCD.
Reliable Perturbative Results for Strong Interactions — H. D. Politzer, 1973. Independent discovery of asymptotic freedom.
Advantages of the Color Octet Gluon Picture — H. Fritzsch, M. Gell-Mann, H. Leutwyler, 1973. Established QCD with color.
CP-Violation in the Renormalizable Theory of Weak Interaction — M. Kobayashi, T. Maskawa, 1973. Predicted three quark generations.
Renormalizable Lagrangians for Massive Yang-Mills Fields — G. 't Hooft, M. Veltman, 1972. Proved renormalizability of gauge theories.
Observation of a New Particle (Higgs) — ATLAS — ATLAS Collaboration, 2012. Discovery of the Higgs boson.
Observation of a New Boson at 125 GeV — CMS — CMS Collaboration, 2012. Independent discovery of the Higgs boson.

General Relativity & Gravitation

The Field Equations of Gravitation — A. Einstein, 1915. The equations of general relativity.
On the Gravitational Field of a Mass Point (Schwarzschild) — K. Schwarzschild, 1916. First exact solution; the black hole metric.
Cosmological Considerations in General Relativity — A. Einstein, 1917. Introduced the cosmological constant.
Maximal Analytic Extension of the Kerr Metric — R. P. Kerr, 1963. Rotating black hole solution.
Gravitational Collapse and Space-Time Singularities — R. Penrose, 1965. Singularity theorem for collapse.
The Four Laws of Black Hole Mechanics — J. Bardeen, B. Carter, S. Hawking, 1973. Thermodynamic analogy for black holes.
Black Holes and Entropy — J. D. Bekenstein, 1973. Black hole entropy proportional to area.
Particle Creation by Black Holes — S. W. Hawking, 1975. Black holes radiate; Hawking temperature.
The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time — S. Hawking, G. Ellis, 1973. Definitive treatise on global GR structure.
Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger — LIGO/Virgo Collaboration, 2016. First direct detection of gravitational waves.
GW170817: Observation of a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral — LIGO/Virgo Collaboration, 2017. Multi-messenger astronomy with gravitational waves.
First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results I — EHT Collaboration, 2019. First image of a black hole shadow.

Cosmology

A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radius — G. Lemaitre, 1927. Expanding universe and Hubble law prediction.
A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae — E. Hubble, 1929. Observational discovery of cosmic expansion.
The Origin of Chemical Elements (Alpher-Bethe-Gamow) — R. Alpher, H. Bethe, G. Gamow, 1948. Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/s — A. Penzias, R. Wilson, 1965. Discovery of the cosmic microwave background.
Cosmic Black-Body Radiation — R. Dicke, P. Peebles, P. Roll, D. Wilkinson, 1965. Interpreted the CMB as Big Bang relic.
The Inflationary Universe — A. H. Guth, 1981. Inflation solves horizon and flatness problems.
A New Inflationary Universe Scenario — A. D. Linde, 1982. Resolved problems of old inflation.
Spectrum of Relict Gravitational Waves and the Early State — V. Mukhanov, G. Chibisov, 1981. Quantum origin of cosmological perturbations.
Measurements of Omega and Lambda from 42 High-Redshift Supernovae — S. Perlmutter et al., 1999. Discovery of cosmic acceleration.
Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe — A. G. Riess et al., 1998. Independent discovery of dark energy.
First-Year WMAP Observations: Determination of Cosmological Parameters — D. N. Spergel et al., 2003. Precision cosmology from the CMB.
Planck 2018 Results VI: Cosmological Parameters — Planck Collaboration, 2018. Definitive CMB measurement of the LCDM model.

Astrophysics & Astronomy

On the Theory of Stars (Chandrasekhar Limit) — S. Chandrasekhar, 1931. Maximum mass of white dwarfs.
On Massive Neutron Cores — J. R. Oppenheimer, G. Volkoff, 1939. Neutron star structure and mass limit.
On Continued Gravitational Contraction — J. R. Oppenheimer, H. Snyder, 1939. First model of gravitational collapse to a black hole.
Synthesis of the Elements in Stars (B2FH) — E. Burbidge, G. Burbidge, W. Fowler, F. Hoyle, 1957. Stellar nucleosynthesis of the elements.
Energy Production in Stars — H. A. Bethe, 1939. Nuclear fusion powers the stars.
Observation of a Rapidly Pulsating Radio Source — A. Hewish, J. Bell et al., 1968. Discovery of pulsars (neutron stars).
Rotation of the Andromeda Nebula (Rubin-Ford) — V. Rubin, W. K. Ford, 1970. Galaxy rotation curves implying dark matter.
The Spectra of Quasi-Stellar Objects (3C 273) — M. Schmidt, 1963. Discovery of quasars at cosmological distances.
Black Holes in Binary Systems (Accretion Disks) — N. Shakura, R. Sunyaev, 1973. Standard model of accretion disks.
Maximum Mass of Galaxies and Galaxy Clusters — J. Ostriker, P. Peebles, A. Yahil, 1974. Argued for massive dark halos.
A Direct Empirical Proof of Dark Matter (Bullet Cluster) — D. Clowe et al., 2006. Separated dark matter from gas in a collision.
The Solar Neutrino Problem (Homestake) — R. Davis, D. Harmer, K. Hoffman, 1968. Deficit of solar neutrinos foretelling oscillations.

Condensed Matter & Many-Body

Theory of Superconductivity (BCS) — J. Bardeen, L. Cooper, J. R. Schrieffer, 1957. Microscopic theory of superconductivity.
On the Theory of Superconductivity (Ginzburg-Landau) — V. Ginzburg, L. Landau, 1950. Phenomenological order-parameter theory.
Absence of Diffusion in Certain Random Lattices — P. W. Anderson, 1958. Anderson localization in disordered systems.
More Is Different — P. W. Anderson, 1972. Manifesto of emergence and broken symmetry.
The Renormalization Group and Critical Phenomena — K. G. Wilson, 1975. RG theory of phase transitions.
New Method for High-Accuracy Determination of Fine-Structure (QHE) — K. von Klitzing, G. Dorda, M. Pepper, 1980. Discovery of the quantum Hall effect.
Quantized Hall Conductance in a Two-Dimensional Periodic Potential (TKNN) — D. Thouless, M. Kohmoto, M. Nightingale, M. den Nijs, 1982. Topology (Chern numbers) in condensed matter.
Two-Dimensional Magnetotransport in the Extreme Quantum Limit (FQHE) — D. Tsui, H. Stormer, A. Gossard, 1982. Discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect.
Anomalous Quantum Hall Effect (Laughlin Wavefunction) — R. B. Laughlin, 1983. Fractionally charged quasiparticles.
Possible High Tc Superconductivity in the Ba-La-Cu-O System — J. G. Bednorz, K. A. Muller, 1986. Discovery of high-temperature superconductors.
Model for a Quantum Hall Effect without Landau Levels (Haldane) — F. D. M. Haldane, 1988. First topological insulator model.
Quantum Spin Hall Effect and Topological Phase Transition (Kane-Mele) — C. L. Kane, E. J. Mele, 2005. Launched the field of topological insulators.
Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films (Graphene) — K. S. Novoselov, A. K. Geim et al., 2004. Isolation of graphene.
Unconventional Superconductivity in Magic-Angle Graphene Superlattices — Y. Cao et al., 2018. Twistronics and flat-band superconductivity.

Atomic, Molecular, Optical & Quantum Information

The Theory of Complex Spectra (Slater Determinant) — J. C. Slater, 1929. Antisymmetric many-electron wavefunctions.
Self-Consistent Equations Including Exchange (Kohn-Sham) — W. Kohn, L. J. Sham, 1965. Practical density functional theory.
Inhomogeneous Electron Gas (Hohenberg-Kohn) — P. Hohenberg, W. Kohn, 1964. Foundational theorems of DFT.
Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation in a Dilute Atomic Vapor — M. H. Anderson et al., 1995. First gaseous BEC.
Theory of Spin Resonance / Laser Cooling Below Doppler Limit — S. Chu, C. Cohen-Tannoudji, W. Phillips, 1989. Laser cooling and trapping of atoms.
Quantum Theory, the Church-Turing Principle and Universal Quantum Computer — D. Deutsch, 1985. Defined the universal quantum computer.
Algorithms for Quantum Computation: Discrete Logarithms and Factoring — P. W. Shor, 1994. Quantum factoring threatens cryptography.
A Fast Quantum Mechanical Algorithm for Database Search — L. K. Grover, 1996. Quantum speedup for search.
Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State via Dual Classical and EPR Channels — C. Bennett et al., 1993. Quantum teleportation protocol.
Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution (BB84) — C. H. Bennett, G. Brassard, 1984. First quantum key distribution protocol.
Scheme for Reducing Decoherence in Quantum Memory — P. W. Shor, 1995. First quantum error-correcting code.
Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor — F. Arute et al. (Google), 2019. Claimed quantum computational advantage.

Nuclear & High-Energy Physics

The Existence of a Neutron — J. Chadwick, 1932. Discovery of the neutron.
Attempt at a Theory of Beta-Radiation — E. Fermi, 1934. Theory of weak interactions and beta decay.
On the Interaction of Elementary Particles (Yukawa) — H. Yukawa, 1935. Predicted the meson and nuclear force carrier.
The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission — N. Bohr, J. A. Wheeler, 1939. Liquid-drop theory of fission.
Question of Parity Conservation in Weak Interactions — T. D. Lee, C. N. Yang, 1956. Proposed parity violation.
Experimental Test of Parity Conservation in Beta Decay (Wu) — C. S. Wu et al., 1957. Observed parity violation.
Evidence for the 2pi Decay of the K2 Meson (CP Violation) — J. Christenson, J. Cronin, V. Fitch, R. Turlay, 1964. Discovery of CP violation.
A Schematic Model of Baryons and Mesons — M. Gell-Mann, 1964. Introduced quarks.
High-Energy Inelastic e-p Scattering (Scaling) — E. Bloom et al., 1969. Evidence for quarks inside protons.
Experimental Observation of a Heavy Particle J — J. J. Aubert et al., 1974. Discovery of the charm quark (J/psi).
Evidence for Oscillation of Atmospheric Neutrinos (Super-K) — Super-Kamiokande Collaboration, 1998. Neutrino oscillations imply neutrino mass.
Observation of Top Quark Production in p-pbar Collisions — CDF Collaboration, 1995. Discovery of the top quark.
Large Mass Hierarchy from a Small Extra Dimension (Randall-Sundrum) — L. Randall, R. Sundrum, 1999. Warped extra dimensions solving hierarchy problem.
The Large N Limit of Superconformal Field Theories (AdS/CFT) — J. Maldacena, 1998. Holographic gauge/gravity duality.

Deep Learning

ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks — Krizhevsky, Sutskever, Hinton, 2012. AlexNet ignited the deep learning revolution by crushing ImageNet.
Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition — He, Zhang, Ren, Sun, 2015. ResNet's skip connections enabled training of ultra-deep networks.
Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training — Ioffe, Szegedy, 2015. Normalizing activations made deep nets train faster and more stably.
Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization — Kingma, Ba, 2014. The default optimizer powering modern deep learning.
Dropout: A Simple Way to Prevent Neural Networks from Overfitting — Srivastava, Hinton, et al., 2014. Randomly dropping units became a staple regularizer.
Learning representations by back-propagating errors — Rumelhart, Hinton, Williams, 1986. Popularized backpropagation, the engine of neural net training.
Long Short-Term Memory — Hochreiter, Schmidhuber, 1997. LSTM solved vanishing gradients for sequence learning.
Generative Adversarial Nets — Goodfellow, Pouget-Abadie, et al., 2014. GANs framed generation as a two-player game.
Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes — Kingma, Welling, 2013. The VAE married deep nets with variational inference.
Deep Learning — LeCun, Bengio, Hinton, 2015. The field's manifesto by its three pioneers.
A Stochastic Approximation Method — Robbins, Monro, 1951. Founded stochastic gradient descent decades before deep learning.

Language Models & NLP

Attention Is All You Need — Vaswani, Shazeer, et al., 2017. The Transformer redefined sequence modeling and birthed LLMs.
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers — Devlin, Chang, Lee, Toutanova, 2018. Bidirectional pretraining swept NLP benchmarks.
Language Models are Few-Shot Learners — Brown, Mann, et al., 2020. GPT-3 showed scale yields in-context learning.
Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space — Mikolov, Chen, Corrado, Dean, 2013. word2vec gave words geometry that captures meaning.
GloVe: Global Vectors for Word Representation — Pennington, Socher, Manning, 2014. Co-occurrence statistics yielded powerful word embeddings.
Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks — Sutskever, Vinyals, Le, 2014. Encoder-decoder nets enabled neural machine translation.
Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate — Bahdanau, Cho, Bengio, 2014. Introduced attention to translation models.
A Mathematical Theory of Communication — Shannon, 1948. Founded information theory and the bit.
Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback — Ouyang, Wu, et al., 2022. InstructGPT/RLHF aligned models with human intent.
Deep contextualized word representations — Peters, Neumann, et al., 2018. ELMo brought context-dependent embeddings.

Computer Vision

Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition — Simonyan, Zisserman, 2014. VGG showed depth with small filters works.
Going Deeper with Convolutions — Szegedy, Liu, et al., 2014. GoogLeNet's inception modules boosted efficiency.
Gradient-Based Learning Applied to Document Recognition — LeCun, Bottou, Bengio, Haffner, 1998. LeNet established convolutional networks for vision.
You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection — Redmon, Divvala, Girshick, Farhadi, 2015. YOLO made real-time object detection practical.
Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection (R-CNN) — Girshick, Donahue, Darrell, Malik, 2013. Launched deep-learning object detection.
U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation — Ronneberger, Fischer, Brox, 2015. The default architecture for segmentation and diffusion.
An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition — Dosovitskiy, et al., 2020. Vision Transformers brought attention to images.
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models — Ho, Jain, Abbeel, 2020. Made diffusion the leading generative image method.
High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models — Rombach, Blattmann, et al., 2021. Stable Diffusion democratized text-to-image generation.
Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision — Radford, Kim, et al., 2021. CLIP linked images and text in one embedding space.
A Computational Approach to Edge Detection — Canny, 1986. The Canny edge detector, a vision classic.

Reinforcement Learning

Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning — Mnih, Kavukcuoglu, et al., 2013. DQN learned to play games from raw pixels.
Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning — Mnih, et al., 2015. DQN reached human-level Atari play in Nature.
Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search — Silver, Huang, et al., 2016. AlphaGo beat a Go world champion.
Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge — Silver, Schrittwieser, et al., 2017. AlphaGo Zero learned superhuman play from scratch.
Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms — Schulman, Wolski, et al., 2017. PPO became the workhorse policy-gradient method.
Trust Region Policy Optimization — Schulman, Levine, et al., 2015. Made policy gradients reliably monotonic.
Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning — Lillicrap, Hunt, et al., 2015. DDPG extended deep RL to continuous actions.
Learning from Delayed Rewards (Q-learning) — Watkins, 1989. Introduced Q-learning, foundation of value-based RL.
Learning to Predict by the Methods of Temporal Differences — Sutton, 1988. Founded temporal-difference learning.
A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go — Silver, Hubert, et al., 2017. AlphaZero generalized self-play mastery across games.

Machine Learning Foundations & Statistics

Random Forests — Breiman, 2001. Ensemble of trees that remains a top tabular method.
Support-Vector Networks — Cortes, Vapnik, 1995. SVMs brought margin-maximization to classification.
XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System — Chen, Guestrin, 2016. The Kaggle-dominating gradient boosting toolkit.
Maximum Likelihood from Incomplete Data via the EM Algorithm — Dempster, Laird, Rubin, 1977. Formalized the EM algorithm for latent variables.
Latent Dirichlet Allocation — Blei, Ng, Jordan, 2003. The foundational topic model.
Regression Shrinkage and Selection via the Lasso — Tibshirani, 1996. L1 regularization for sparse models.
Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines — Metropolis, et al., 1953. Birth of the Metropolis MCMC algorithm.
Sampling-Based Approaches to Calculating Marginal Densities — Gelfand, Smith, 1990. Popularized Gibbs sampling in statistics.
Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures — Breiman, 2001. Framed the algorithmic vs. data-model divide.
An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances — Bayes, Price, 1763. The original statement of Bayes' theorem.

Theory of Computation & Algorithms

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem — Turing, 1936. Defined computation and the universal machine.
The Complexity of Theorem-Proving Procedures — Cook, 1971. Introduced NP-completeness via SAT.
Reducibility Among Combinatorial Problems — Karp, 1972. Showed 21 problems are NP-complete.
A Note on Two Problems in Connexion with Graphs — Dijkstra, 1959. Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm.
An Algorithm for the Machine Calculation of Complex Fourier Series — Cooley, Tukey, 1965. The Fast Fourier Transform.
Computing Machinery and Intelligence — Turing, 1950. Posed the imitation game and machine thinking.
Programming with Abstract Data Types / Quicksort — Hoare, 1962. Quicksort, a foundational sorting algorithm.
A Machine-Oriented Logic Based on the Resolution Principle — Robinson, 1965. Resolution underlies automated theorem proving.
How to Generate Cryptographically Strong Sequences (P vs NP context) — Blum, Micali, 1984. Foundations of pseudorandomness.
The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web — Page, Brin, Motwani, Winograd, 1999. The algorithm behind Google search.

Cryptography & Security

New Directions in Cryptography — Diffie, Hellman, 1976. Invented public-key cryptography and key exchange.
A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems — Rivest, Shamir, Adleman, 1978. RSA, the workhorse public-key system.
Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems — Shannon, 1949. Founded the mathematical theory of cryptography.
Probabilistic Encryption — Goldwasser, Micali, 1984. Defined semantic security.
The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof-Systems — Goldwasser, Micali, Rackoff, 1985. Introduced zero-knowledge proofs.
How to Play ANY Mental Game — Goldreich, Micali, Wigderson, 1987. Foundations of secure multiparty computation.
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System — Nakamoto, 2008. Launched blockchain and decentralized currency.
Fully Homomorphic Encryption Using Ideal Lattices — Gentry, 2009. First fully homomorphic encryption scheme.
Identity-Based Encryption from the Weil Pairing — Boneh, Franklin, 2001. Practical identity-based encryption via pairings.
Reflections on Trusting Trust — Thompson, 1984. Profound warning about compiler backdoors.

Systems, Networking & Databases

A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks — Codd, 1970. Founded relational databases and SQL.
The Google File System — Ghemawat, Gobioff, Leung, 2003. Blueprint for large-scale distributed storage.
MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters — Dean, Ghemawat, 2004. Programming model behind big-data processing.
Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data — Chang, et al., 2006. Inspired a generation of NoSQL databases.
Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store — DeCandia, et al., 2007. Pioneered eventually-consistent distributed stores.
Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System — Lamport, 1978. Foundational logical clocks for distributed systems.
The Part-Time Parliament (Paxos) — Lamport, 1998. The classic consensus algorithm.
A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication — Cerf, Kahn, 1974. Defined TCP/IP, the basis of the Internet.
The UNIX Time-Sharing System — Ritchie, Thompson, 1974. Described the influential UNIX operating system.
In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Raft) — Ongaro, Ousterhout, 2014. Made distributed consensus teachable.

Mathematics

Uber formal unentscheidbare Satze (On Formally Undecidable Propositions) — Godel, 1931. The incompleteness theorems shook foundations.
Non-cooperative Games — Nash, 1951. Proved existence of the Nash equilibrium.
Modular Elliptic Curves and Fermat's Last Theorem — Wiles, 1995. Proved Fermat's Last Theorem.
Manifolds of Negative Curvature / Riemann's Habilitation — Riemann, 1854. Founded Riemannian geometry, basis for relativity.
The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior — von Neumann, Morgenstern, 1944. Founded game theory.
Polynomial-time algorithm for linear programming (Khachiyan) — Khachiyan, 1979. First polynomial LP algorithm (ellipsoid method).
A New Polynomial-Time Algorithm for Linear Programming — Karmarkar, 1984. Interior-point methods for linear programming.
PRIMES is in P — Agrawal, Kayal, Saxena, 2004. Deterministic polynomial-time primality testing.
The Foundations of Statistics / On the Mathematical Foundations of Theoretical Statistics — Fisher, 1922. Founded modern mathematical statistics.
A Combinatorial Problem in Geometry (Ramsey theory) — Erdos, Szekeres, 1935. Seminal in combinatorics and Ramsey theory.

Chemistry & Materials

Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold — Jumper, et al., 2021. Solved the protein folding problem.
Self-Consistent Equations Including Exchange and Correlation Effects — Kohn, Sham, 1965. Made density functional theory practical.
Inhomogeneous Electron Gas — Hohenberg, Kohn, 1964. Founded density functional theory.
The Nature of the Chemical Bond — Pauling, 1931. Established quantum theory of chemical bonding.
Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films — Novoselov, Geim, et al., 2004. Discovery of graphene's electronic properties.
Development and Use of Quantum Mechanical Molecular Models (AM1) — Dewar, et al., 1985. Widely used semi-empirical quantum chemistry.
A Generalized Gradient Approximation (PBE functional) — Perdew, Burke, Ernzerhof, 1996. The most-cited DFT exchange-correlation functional.
Comparison of Simple Potential Functions for Simulating Liquid Water — Jorgensen, et al., 1983. TIP water models underpin biomolecular simulation.
Electrophoretic Transfer of Proteins (Western Blot) — Towbin, Staehelin, Gordon, 1979. A ubiquitous lab technique.
A Simple Method for Displaying the Hydropathic Character of a Protein — Kyte, Doolittle, 1982. Standard hydrophobicity analysis tool.

Biology, Genomics & Medicine

Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid — Watson, Crick, 1953. Revealed the DNA double helix.
DNA Sequencing with Chain-Terminating Inhibitors — Sanger, Nicklen, Coulson, 1977. Sanger sequencing opened the genomic era.
Initial Sequencing and Analysis of the Human Genome — Lander, et al., 2001. The draft human genome.
A Programmable Dual-RNA-Guided DNA Endonuclease (CRISPR-Cas9) — Jinek, Chylinski, et al., 2012. Launched the CRISPR gene-editing revolution.
Enzymatic Amplification of DNA (PCR) — Saiki, Mullis, et al., 1985. Invented PCR, transforming molecular biology.
Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) — Altschul, et al., 1990. The most-used sequence search algorithm.
Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Adult Fibroblasts — Takahashi, Yamanaka, 2006. Created iPS cells, redefining regenerative medicine.
On the Origin of Species — Darwin, 1859. Established evolution by natural selection.
Versuche uber Pflanzenhybriden (Experiments on Plant Hybridization) — Mendel, 1866. Founded the science of genetics.
The Structure of Systematic Relationships / Molecular Cloning — Cohen, Boyer, et al., 1973. First recombinant DNA, birth of biotechnology.

Neuroscience & Cognitive Science

A Quantitative Description of Membrane Current — Hodgkin, Huxley, 1952. Mathematical model of the action potential.
Receptive Fields, Binocular Interaction and Functional Architecture in the Cat's Visual Cortex — Hubel, Wiesel, 1962. Mapped how the visual cortex processes images.
A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity — McCulloch, Pitts, 1943. First mathematical model of a neuron.
The Organization of Behavior (Hebbian learning) — Hebb, 1949. Neurons that fire together wire together.
Neural Networks and Physical Systems with Emergent Collective Computational Abilities — Hopfield, 1982. Hopfield networks linked physics and memory.
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two — Miller, 1956. Quantified the limits of working memory.
Place Units in the Hippocampus of the Freely Moving Rat — O'Keefe, Dostrovsky, 1971. Discovered place cells, the brain's GPS.
A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward — Schultz, Dayan, Montague, 1997. Linked dopamine to reward-prediction error.
The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage — Rosenblatt, 1958. The first trainable artificial neuron.
How to Build a Brain (Integration of Information) — Tononi, 2004. Proposed integrated information theory of consciousness.

Economics & Game Theory

The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities — Black, Scholes, 1973. The Black-Scholes option pricing formula.
Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk — Kahneman, Tversky, 1979. Founded behavioral economics.
Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases — Tversky, Kahneman, 1974. Catalogued systematic biases in human judgment.
The Use of Knowledge in Society — Hayek, 1945. Classic argument on prices and dispersed information.
Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games — Nash, 1950. Proved existence of equilibrium for finite games.
The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism — Akerlof, 1970. Founded the economics of asymmetric information.
The Nature of the Firm — Coase, 1937. Explained why firms exist via transaction costs.
Portfolio Selection — Markowitz, 1952. Founded modern portfolio theory.
A Theory of the Consumption Function / Capital Asset Prices — Sharpe, 1964. The Capital Asset Pricing Model.
The Problem of Social Cost — Coase, 1960. The Coase theorem on externalities and bargaining.