When Research Papers Had Two Pages And A Few References … But Where Still Great … Lehmann’s Primality Test
As a reviewer for a journal, I receive many papers that go on for many pages and are full of references. But in the end, you often worry about whether the paper is just manufactured to look like a research paper, or whether it has some real contributions. Often you feel that the author could have just said what the wanted to in just a few pages. Merkle’s classic patent on Merkle trees was just a few pages long, for example, but it has since become the foundation of blockchain technology. I read many classic papers from the past, and they would probably struggle to get past the first review, as they don’t follow the current standard for research papers. So, we must worry, that we are creating a research industry which is just going through the motions for many of the research contributions.
In research, it is important to know the core roots of an area, and this often involves diving back to the classic research papers and patents. And, so, with the rise of public-key encryption, and its usage of prime numbers, let’s look at a paper from 1982 [here]:
