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Ugh, if you look at the bottom of the pretty great works you will see Guy Steele's master's thesis where he defined the Scheme programming language and its compiler.

I know when I was writing my thesis I was pretty disgusted that he ruined it for all of us mere mortals. ;)

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I think Claude Shannon's (of information theory fame) master's thesis beats out all others in the field of computer science.

"A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits", 1938, proves that you can use electrical switches to do boolean algebra! He basically invented the digital computer, as a master's thesis.

Not to diminish Shannon's genius at all, but he wasn't the first to make logic circuits. http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS/Repository/1.0/Disseminate?vi... On page 917 you can see Charles Sanders Pierce and Alan Marquand made some in the 1880's.

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