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Comment by javert | Hacker News Reader

> you can have a greater impact by doing research. At least that's my opinion. I have tons of respect for entrepreneurs like Henry Ford or Larry Page but can you compare their contributions to the ones of Carl Friedrich Gauss or Alan Turing?

As a PhD student, I tend to think the opposite.

Entrepreneurs who are successful tend to change the world, or at least improve it. Even if you have a small business, you are helping fuel the economy.

It seems that most academics tend not to improve the world or fuel the economy.

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Matt Might's illustrated guide to the PhD sort of shows this quite succinctly [1]. I don't think there are any memorable PhD theses that significantly changed anything, save for Shannon's. World-changing researchers do exist, but I think they are created after they obtain their PhD, rather than before; it's unreasonable in my eyes to expect anyone to make such significant contributions in the infancy of their research careers.

[1] : http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

It's not unheard of for PhD thesis work to change the world within the academic discipline in question. Possible examples: Louis de Broglie (quantum physics applied to electrons as well as photons), Hugh Everett (many-worlds interpretation of QM), John Nash (Nash equilibria in game theory), Bernhard Riemann (conformal mapping, simple-connectedness, Laudent series), Noam Chomsky (transformational grammar), Eric Drexler (first proposal of nanotechnology).

Also, I think Google came out of Page's & Brin's PhD work, but they decided that building a company around it was a better idea than getting PhDs for it.

> within the academic discipline in question.

This is a nit pick, but all the examples you gave are of people who actually changed the world, not just some sliver of academia.

That said, changing your sliver of academia is likely to imply changing the world if you're in certain areas of math or science or engineering.

The only time when you can change your sliver of academia but not change the real world, is when your sliver of academia does not contribute to the real world, which is (unfortunately) common, particularly in the humanities. (Which is sad, because we actually really need good humanities study/education in order to build a good world.)

> I don't think there are any memorable PhD theses that significantly changed anything, save for Shannon's.

I think that's going way too far in the other direction.

I certainly know of PhD theses in my research area that have made contributions to the area, and these contributions (or derivative ones) are very likely to make it into real products eventually.

A lot of PhD computer science students have the benefit of taking 5 years or so to really work hard on something consistently that would be very hard to accomplish with the same level of rigour in industry.

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