Allow me to disagree. Chris Okasaki's thesis, "Purely Functional Data Structures" is That Good for the field of functional programming. There are other exemplary papers, like Godel's incompleteness theorem, Cantor's diagonal argument, or Einstein's statement of special relativity. Or Satoshi's paper on Bitcoin.

These papers are not exhaustive summaries of a field. But a reader comes away understanding the type of problems a field is devoted to solving and many of the existing ideas. And I believe that each is a paragon of their field.