Recommended Computer Science Papers

by Madeleine Thompson, originally written 2018–12–09, last updated 2025–01-05

theory

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, by Alan Turing (1936)
A Mathematical Theory of Communication, by Claude Shannon (1948)
Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I, by John McCarthy (1960)
Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages, by Christopher Strachey (1967)
Reflections on Trusting Trust, by Ken Thompson (1984)
A Computer Scientist's View of Life, the Universe, and Everything, by Jürgen Schmidhuber (1997)

distributed systems

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System, by Leslie Lamport (1978)
The Part-Time Parliament, by Leslie Lamport (1998)
MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters, by Jeffrey Dean and and Sanjay Ghemawat (2004)
The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems, by Mike Burrows (2006)
Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data, by Fay Chang et al (2006)
Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store, by Giuseppe DeCandia et al (2007)
Spanner: Google's Globally Distributed Database, by James C. Corbett et al (2013)
The Design and Implementation of Modern Column-Oriented Database Systems, by Daniel Abadi et al (2013)
Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostate's Opinion, by Pat Helland (2016)

numerical programming

Division by Invariant Integers using Multiplication, by Granlund and Montgomery (1994)
SGEMM: A full walk through of the SGEMM implementation, by Scott Gray (2017)
PCG: A Family of Simple Fast Space-Efficient Statistically Good Algorithms for Random Number Generation, by Melissa E. O’Neill (2014)
Scrambled Linear Pseudorandom Number Generators, by Blackman and Vigna (2018)
Benchmarking and Dissecting the Nvidia Hopper GPU Architecture, by Luo, Fan, et al (2024)

other

How Complex Systems Fail, by Richard Cook (2000)
A Layered Grammar of Graphics, by Hadley Wickham (2010)