I believe there is great value in reading a text in its original format. More than "value": reading a masterpiece from the source -- even better in its original language, even better in the first edition! -- invests the reader of the same euphoric spirit of discovery the author felt in the first place. It's a kind of superpower, and thanks to the Internet it is available to anyone.

So I thought that it would be of interest to a general readership to put in a single page links to Classics in a very specific discipline: Applied Mathematics. The hope is that its practitioners may feel some of the original electricity. The selection of papers is idiosyncratic, which is perhaps a poor excuse for not stating my criteria. The ones that make the list are simple, elegant, and relevant. They opened new vistas for coming generations of researchers, while managing to be astoundingly clear and fully-formed, like Athena springing from the mind of Zeus.

It's a small list, perhaps more interesting for its omissions than its inclusions. I am very open to suggestions to expand it. Email me at paleologo@gmail.com, or message me on twitter at @gappy3000.

1. A. Einstein. On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid Demanded by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat. Annalen Der Physik, 322, 549–560 (1905).
2. C. E. Shannon. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell Systems Technical Journal, 27, 379-343 and 623-656 (1948)
3. J. Nash. Non-Cooperative Games. Annals of Mathematics, 54, 286-295 (1951)
4. R. E. Kalman. A New Approach to Linear Filtering and Prediction Problems. Transactions of the ASME, 82, 35-45 (1960)
5. E. N. Lorenz. Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 20, 130-141 (1963)
6. J. W. Cooley and J. W. Tukey. An Algorithm for the Machine Calculation of Complex Fourier Series. Math. Comp. 19, 297–301 (1965)
7. G. Golub and W. Kahan. Calculating the Singular Values and Pseudo-Inverse of a Matrix. J. SIAM Numerical Analysis (B), 2, 205-224
8. R. May. Simple Mathematical Models with Very Complicated Dynamics. Nature, 459-467 (1976)
9. L. G. Valiant. A Theory of the Learnable. Communications of the ACM, 27, 1134-1142