Fermat's Library

Previously Featured Papers

All

Biology

Computer Science

Economics

Mathematics

Physics

Improving immunisation coverage in rural India: clustered randomised controlled evaluation of immunisation campaigns with and without incentives

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo et al. - 15 comments

Inventing the randomized double-blind trial: the Nuremberg salt test of 1835

Michael Stolberg - 12 comments

On building systems that will fail

Fernando J. Corbató - 11 comments

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

Eugene Wigner - 7 comments

Telesoftware: adding intelligence to teletext

J. Hedger and R. Eason - 8 comments

A Short History of Markov Chain Monte Carlo: Subjective Recollections from Incomplete Data

Christian Robert and George Casella - 10 comments

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power

Pushker A. Kharecha and James E. Hansen - 10 comments

Ancient Babylonian astronomers calculated Jupiter’s position from the area under a time-velocity graph

Mathieu Ossendrijver - 7 comments

Security Analysis of the Estonian Internet Voting System

Springall et al. - 13 comments

Are Titles of Chemical Papers Becoming More Informative?

Jacques J. Tocatlian - 7 comments

What is it like to be a bat?

Thomas Nagel - 7 comments

Dishonesty in Everyday Life and Its Policy Implications

Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely - 13 comments

Opinions and Social Pressure

Solomon E. Asch - 7 comments

The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?

Gavin A. Schmidt and Adam Frank - 9 comments

Some Studies In Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers

A. L. Samuel - 11 comments

The Powerful Placebo

Beecher et al. - 7 comments

Groupthink

Irving Janis - 6 comments

Prediction and Entropy of Printed English

Claude Shannon - 6 comments

An insulin index of foods: the insulin demand generated by 1000-kJ portions of common foods

Susanne HA Holt, Janette C Brand Miller, and Peter Petocz - 21 comments

Computer Software

Alan Kay - 18 comments

The Programmer As Navigator

Charles Bachman - 7 comments

Statistical tests, P values, confidence intervals, and power: a guide to misinterpretations

Sander Greenland et al. - 18 comments

The Value of Science

Richard P. Feynman - 14 comments

The Tunnel of Samos

Tom Apostol - 13 comments

Scientific Aspects of Juggling

C. E. Shannon - 11 comments

How often does an integer occur as a binomial coefficient?

David Singmaster - 4 comments

Mosh: An Interactive Remote Shell for Mobile Clients

Keith Winstein and Hari Balakrishnan - 8 comments

Where are they? Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing

Nick Bolstrom - 15 comments

The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers

Daniel F. Chambliss - 19 comments

The Function of Dream Sleep

Francis Crick & Graeme Mitchison - 12 comments

Technological Requirements for Terraforming Mars

Robert Zubrin and Christopher McKay - 10 comments

A Not So Famous Goldbach Conjecture

Christian Goldbach - 8 comments

Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative?

Sandi Mann & Rebekah Cadman - 11 comments

A Mathematician’s Lament

Paul Lockhart - 16 comments

Russian blues reveal effects of language on color descrimination

Winawer et al. - 6 comments

Physics as a Way of Thinking

Alpheus W. Smith - 17 comments

Pick the Largest Number

Thomas Cover - 3 comments

Why some things are darker when wet

John Lekner and Michael C. Dorf - 9 comments

Douglas Carl Engelbart: Developing the Underlying Concepts for Contemporary Computing

Susan B. Barnes - 20 comments

Recounting the rationals

Neil Calkin and Herbert S. Wilf - 13 comments

Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?

Edward N. Lorenz - 7 comments

Birds and Frogs

Freeman Dyson - 17 comments

Satellite Communication - An overview of the problems and programs

Wilbur Pritchard - 12 comments

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

John P. A. Ioannidis - 13 comments

The Beginning of the Monte Carlo Method

N. Metropolis - 9 comments

A measurement of excess antenna temperature at 4080 mc/s

Penzias and Wilson - 7 comments

Reading Chess

Henry Baird and Ken Thompson - 9 comments

How Many Objects Can Be Juggled

Jack Kalvan - 6 comments

How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru

John McMillan and Pablo Zoido - 9 comments

Life's Irreducible Structure

Michael Polanyi - 12 comments

Von Neumann's First Computer Program

Donald Knuth - 7 comments

How Often Should You Beat Your Kids?

Don Zagier - 7 comments

Mental Accounting and Consumer Choice

Richard H. Thaler - 7 comments

Can lifestyle changes reverse coronary heart disease?

Ornish et al - 9 comments

Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman - 13 comments

Quantum physics dropwise

Tomas Bohr - 10 comments

A Set of Eight Numbers

Arthur Porges - 9 comments

Voyager Mission Telecommunication Firsts

Posner et al - 12 comments

Why is π² so close to 10?

Noam D. Elkies - 5 comments

3D structures of individual mammalian genomes studied by single-cell Hi-C

Stevens et al. - 8 comments

The Split Brain in Man

Michael S. Gazzaniga - 12 comments

Drawing an elephant with four complex parameters

J. Mayer, K. Khairy, J. Howard - 8 comments

The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature

P. A. M. Dirac - 13 comments

Accurate SHAPE-directed RNA secondary structure modeling, including pseudoknots

Hajdin et al. - 8 comments

Sleep and Mortality: A Population-Based 22-Year Follow-Up Study

Hublin et al - 10 comments

Shelling Out: The Origins of Money

Nick Szabo - 23 comments

Personalized Nutrition by Prediction of Glycemic Responses

David Zeevi, Tal Korem, Niv Zmora, et al. - 8 comments

Fermat’s method of "descente infinie"

Stan Dolan - 8 comments

A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence

John McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude E. Shannon - 9 comments

Simpson's Paradox and the Hot Hand in Basketball

Robert L. Wardrop - 10 comments

Shut Up and Calculate

Max Tegmark - 15 comments

Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation

Freeman Dyson - 11 comments

Self-Control Relies on Glucose as a Limited Energy Source: Willpower Is More Than a Metaphor

Gailliot et al - 8 comments

Human and nonhuman primate meninges harbor lymphatic vessels that can be visualized noninvasively by MRI

Martina Absinta et al. - 6 comments

The Reservisor Automated Airline Reservation System: Combining Communications and Computing

Jon Eklund - 10 comments

The Standard Double Soap Bubble in ℝ² uniquely minimizes perimeter

Joel Foisy et al - 7 comments

More is Different

P. W. Anderson - 9 comments

Modeling: optimal marathon performance on the basis of physiological factors

Michael J. Joyner - 10 comments

Social Facilitation

Robert B. Zajonc - 5 comments

The Emperor's Old Clothes

Tony Hoare - 26 comments

The Uncertainty of Science

Richard P. Feynman - 20 comments

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment

Charles T. Munger - 34 comments

Where is everybody? An account of Fermi's question

Eric M. Jones - 10 comments

Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren

John Maynard Keynes - 12 comments

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge

Abraham Flexner - 14 comments

Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform

Vitalik Buterin - 18 comments

Proof Without Words: Pythagorean Runs

Michael Boardman - 6 comments

Eliminating the Penny from the U.S. coinage system: An economic analysis

Raymond E. Lombra - 8 comments

On Being Smart

Nabil H. Mustafa - 12 comments

Electronic Lottery Tickets as Micropayments

Ronald L Rivest - 7 comments

On the series of prime reciprocals

James A. Clarkson - 4 comments

Assessing “Dangerous Climate Change”: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature

James Hansen et al. - 19 comments

The Neutron Enigma

G. L. Greene and P. Geltenbort - 11 comments

Programming Considered as a Human Activity

Edsger W. Dijkstra - 13 comments

Man-computer symbiosis

J. C. R. Licklider - 7 comments

A proof that Euler missed: Evaluating ζ(2) the Easy Way.

Tom Apostol - 7 comments

Pythagorean Theorem proof in Zhoubi Suanjing

Zhao Shuang - 4 comments

DeepStack: Expert-Level Artificial Intelligence in Heads-Up No-Limit Poker

Moravcik et al - 10 comments

Immigration Act of 1924

United States Government - 8 comments

Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory

A. M. Turing - 11 comments

When CSI Meets Public WiFi: Inferring Your Mobile Phone Password via WiFi Signals

Mengyuan Li et al - 10 comments

Why We Need Friendly AI

L. Muehlhauser & N. Bostrom - 11 comments

Prospect Theory

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky - 9 comments

Optimum rehearsal patterns and name learning

T. K. Landauer, R. A. Bjork - 11 comments

A note on Euclid’s Theorem concerning the infinitude of the primes

Filip Saidak - 4 comments

Some Funny Things Happened on the Way to the Moon

Richard H. Battin - 12 comments

About the irrationality of e=2.718...

J. Liouville - 5 comments

The Proposal of the Neutrino

Wolfgang Pauli - 4 comments

Development and Application of NASA's First Standard Spacecraft Computer

Charles E. Trevathan et al - 14 comments

Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care

Kenneth Arrow - 12 comments

What is Life?

Erwin Schrodinger - 7 comments

Elementary proof that e is irational

L.L. Penesi - 3 comments

The Scattering of Cosmic Rays by the Stars of a Galaxy

Richard P. Feynman and Manuel S. Vallarta - 4 comments

The Theory of Interstellar Trade

Paul Krugman - 14 comments

A One-Line Proof of the Infinitude of Primes

Sam Northshield - 4 comments

Patterns of genic intolerance of rare copy number variation in 59,898 human exomes

Douglas M Ruderfer et al - 10 comments

1. Using neural nets to recognize handwritten digits

Michael Nielsen - 57 comments

Possible Existence of a Neutron

J. Chadwick - 6 comments

Examining How the Great Firewall Discovers Hidden Circumvention Servers

Ensafi et al - 8 comments

My observations during the explosion at Trinity

Enrico Fermi - 8 comments

Why the Internet only just works

M Handley - 14 comments

Gabriel's Horn (Thought Experiments Mathematics)

Fredrick Kennard - 7 comments

Proof Without Words: Cubes and Squares

J. Barry Love - 2 comments

A Sample of Brilliance

Jon Bentley - 7 comments

Isaac Newton as a Probabilist

Stephen M. Stigler - 14 comments

How to Expose an Eavesdropper

Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir - 8 comments

The Brachistochrone Curve: The Problem of Quickest Descent

Yutaka Nishiyama - 16 comments

A Note on the Confinement Problem

Butler W. Lampson - 7 comments

A theorem about primes proved on a chessboard

Loren C. Larson - 13 comments

One-sentence proof of Fermat's theorem on sums of two squares

D. Zagier - 10 comments

An elementary proof of Wallis’ product formula for pi

Johan Wastlünd - 9 comments

How to Share a Secret

Adi Shamir - 6 comments

Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?

Nick Bostrom - 27 comments

The Parallel Climbers Puzzle

Alan Tucker - 5 comments

Folding Paper in Half

Gaurish Korpal - 9 comments

The Historical Development of Computer Chess and its Impact on Artificial Intelligence

David Heath, Derek Allum - 13 comments

An elementary treatment of the Feynman sprinkler

Alejandro Jenkins - 8 comments

A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae

Edwin Hubble - 13 comments

A really trivial proof of the Lucas-Lehmer test

J. W. Bruce - 19 comments

How to explain zero-knowledge protocols to your children

Jean-Jacques Quisquater, Louis Guillou , Marie Annick, Tom Berson - 5 comments

Many lives in many worlds

Max Tegmark - 17 comments

Decreasing-Rate Pruning Optimizes the Construction of Efficient and Robust Distributed Networks

Saket Navlakha, Alison L. Barth and Ziv Bar-Joseph - 24 comments

A pendulum theorem

D. J. Acheson - 8 comments

New proof of a minimum property of the regular n-gon

L.F Toth - 9 comments

Cassini, Rømer and the velocity of light

Bobis L. & Lequeux J. - 14 comments

Water extraction on Mars for an expanding human colony

Ralphs M., Franz B., Baker T., Howe S. - 14 comments

Agrarian Justice

Thomas Paine - 15 comments

The transcendence of π

Ivan Niven - 25 comments

Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger

B. P. Abbott et al. - 21 comments

Feynman's proof of the Maxwell equations

Freeman Dyson - 12 comments

TOR: The second generation onion router

Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, Paul Syverson - 15 comments

Irrationality of √2, a geometric proof

Tom Apostol - 5 comments

A new proof of Euclid's Theorem

Filip Saidak - 16 comments

End to the Cosmic-Ray Spectrum?

Kenneth Greisen - 8 comments

Fermat's Last Theorem in Combinatorial Form

W. V. Quine - 3 comments

Irrationality of √m

Harley Flanders - 6 comments

Reflections on Trusting Trust

Ken Thompson - 14 comments

Shortest paper ever published in a serious Math Journal

John Conway and Alexander Soifer - 7 comments

Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State via Dual Classical and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Channels

Charles H. Bennett et al. - 11 comments

On a generalization of the definite integral

H. Lebesgue - 5 comments

Studies on the Chemical Nature of the Substance Inducing Transformation of Pneumococcal Types

Oswald T. et al - 15 comments

On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox

J. S. Bell - 17 comments

Counterexample to Euler's Conjecture on sums of like powers

L. J. Lander and T. R. Parkin - 3 comments

A combinatorial proof of Fermat's "Little" Theorem

S.W.Golomb - 9 comments

Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine

John McCarthy - 28 comments

Evidence for Oscillation of Atmospheric Neutrinos

Super-Kamiokande Collaboration - 14 comments

A Geometric Proof that e is Irrational

Jonathan Sondow - 7 comments

Feynman's derivation of the Schrodinger equation

David Derbes - 14 comments

Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money

John Nash - 63 comments

The Positive Electron

Carl D. Anderson - 13 comments

Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids

J. D. Watson, F. H. Crick - 8 comments

A simple proof that π is irrational

Ivan Niven (1946) - 10 comments

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Satoshi Nakamoto - 50 comments

Fermat’s Library Journal Club

Fermat’s Library is a platform for illuminating academic papers. Every week we send you a new paper annotated by the community in the fields of Mathematics, Physics, Economics, Computer Science and Biology.

Paper of the Week

Previously Featured Papers

Subscribe below to receive our weekly papers

Products

Project