What academic researchers published very few scientific articles (say, less than twenty) but exerted large influences on their fields of study?

Question

I find researchers and writers who published very little, yet were influential in their respective fields of study, interesting. A good example of such a researcher was the mathematician C. F. Gauss, whose motto was "Pauca sed matura" ("Few but ripe"). Authors who seemed to have adhered to a similar motto were Harper Lee, J. D. Salinger, and G. T. di Lampedusa.

What are some good examples of scientists and other academics who were not prolific, yet were nonetheless able to leave their mark?

Let's set the bar the for maximum number of publications at 20, so as to include more possible scientists as answers to this question

Answer 1

Gregor Mendel had only a small number of publications (in fact, really only one major publication, "Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden"—"Experiments on Plant Hybridization" in English), but he laid the groundwork for the modern understanding of genetics.

He was not influential in his own time; his work was, in fact, all but ignored when it was published in the 1860s. Most of the leading biologists of the time, including Darwin, were unaware of Mendel's experiments. However, in the early twentieth century, Mendel's work was rediscovered and duplicated, and since that time it has been incredibly influential. Had his work on pea plant genetics gotten the attention it deserved at the time, he might have been able to continue his work; as it was, when he became abbot at St. Thomas's Abbey in Brno in 1867, he no longer had time to pursue his experiments himself.

Answer 2

Arguably, Claude Shannon, who started the field of information theory. Peter Higgs is another.

Answer 3

Two mathematicians, both working in geometry/topology and both with <20 papers:

1. Andrew Casson has been extraordinarily influential, but only has 17 papers on MathScinet. Much of his most important work (e.g. on the Casson invariant of homology 3-spheres) was written up and published by other people.

2. Steven Kerckhoff is also a very important mathematician. MathScinet lists him as having 20 papers, but one of them is his thesis (which is not a real publication -- the main result was published in the journal Topology), so he has 19 "real" papers.

By the way, I didn't have to remove Casson's thesis since he did not have a PhD. He did attend graduate school at the University of Liverpool, but his dislike for writing began early and he didn't write a thesis.

Answer 4

Henry Moseley had a very brief career and published only eight papers before being killed during the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915. In Isaac Asimov's estimation, "his death might well have been the most costly single death of the War to mankind generally." However, the works Moseley did complete included pioneering applications of X-ray spectroscopy in physics that, among other things, established the concept of atomic number as a non-arbitrary quantity, refined our understanding of atomic structure, and let him predict the existence of several new elements.

Answer 5

Though Gauss published little in his lifetime, he wrote quite a lot, and many of his writings have been subsequently published and are now publicly available --- his are quite substantial. In any case, an obvious place to look would be major mathematicians who died young. For example, Évariste Galois made a major contribution to abstract algebra and then died in a duel at the age of twenty, so consequently his published output was small, despite its large impact.

Answer 6

Jack Silver had a tremendous influence on set theory but published only 11 papers. (MathSciNet lists 14, but one is his thesis and two are solutions of problems in the American Mathematical Monthly.) His contributions include the theory of indiscernibles for the constructible universe (later named 0^#), the theorem that the generalized continuum hypothesis (GCH) cannot first fail at a singular cardinal of uncountable cofinality, the "countable vs. perfect" dichotomy for co-analytic equivalence relations, the proof that GCH holds in the model of sets constructible from a normal measure, and the proof that analytic sets have the Ramsey property. Each of these has been the foundation for a great deal of continuing research.