In his/her John Nash comment, AV8R says, "I remember reading somewhere that his dissertation was only 28 pages." I have occasionally wondered what is the shortest-ever dissertation at a regionally accredited school. There was a legend that someone who invented a miracle drug in his chemistry doctoral program submitted a 7-digit dissertation: his U S patent number. A Google search (Are there any credible PhD dissertations that are less than 10 pages? - Quora) finds this 8-pager at Harvard. Single or double spaced, do you suppose?: "Singularities, Supersymmetry and Combinatorial Reciprocity (2013) by Roberto Martinez at Harvard was an 8-page long dissertation that significantly generalized the results of Edward Witten's Quantum Field Theory and the Jones Polynomial (1989)"
I tried - and couldn't find any of lesser length. Funny, all the short ones I found were math-related. I thought I had a record (3 pages) from Princeton - but it turned out to be a Senior Thesis, not a PhD. It's this one: Gianluca Tempesti '89, Electrical Engineering, "Overview Opto-Electronic Integrated Circuits." Found it on this page: http://www.princeton.edu/mudd/news/faq/procedures/theses_dissertations.shtml I did find a humorous site where real theses are reduced to funny, one-line summaries. You can get random ones or pick your favourite subject/school. Sample: "When the Roman army leaves town, you end up moving to the hills and making ugly pots." (Archaeology, University of Durham) For laughs, the site is here: lol my thesis :smile: J.
Here's my submission: "On the Pathological Character of Independent Random Variables," by Donald G. Brennan. Dissertation for PhD in Mathematics at MIT in 1959. 23 pages http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/42560/32515753-MIT.pdf?sequence=2
Good - but much longer than Dr. Bear's original 8-page submission that started us on the search, which has been a lot of fun. Best I can come up with is 9 pages, from MIT: Rector, David Lee. An unstable Adams spectral sequence It's listed here: MIT Libraries' catalog - Barton - Full Catalog - Full Record I read that the math in this PhD thesis takes up 3 pages. The rest is title page, intro, bibliography etc. J.
Not quite a record, but this great German-Jewish mathematician's PhD thesis was 14 pages. I read that the English translation is 17 pages. Edmund Landau - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia J.
And furthermore . . . what is a page? When my wife was told, in her distance MA program at Cal State University, that the thesis could be no more than 30 pages, she asked what they meant by "page." When they didn't understand, she submitted one page that was typewritten (pica type), double spaced, wide margins, and 170 words . . . and another that was typeset, single space, 10-point condensed type, narrow margins, and 600 words.
