Important Research Papers in Computer Science

A Mathematical Theory of Communicationc (C. E. SHANNON)
This is the historic paper that made things change from analog t0 digital. Claude Shanon during his research he wrote this ground breaking paper which at its time seemed insignificant but transformed the way the data works. The genius of Shanon is quite undermined but the fact this small research paper gave way to whole new field of study is commendable. This paper is a must for Computer Science and Electronice and Electrical Engineering undergrads.
First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (John von Neumann)
While we do talk about the number of cores, cache sizes, registers, etc., we have in modern computers we often forget who came up with this architecture of computers. The paper is not about RISC or CISC architectures or Register logic but is quite abtract and yet elegant. This paper tells how a simple blue print to an idea revolutionized everything to the point that all modern computers still follow Neumann architecture.
Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Alan Turing)
We all have watched the movie Imitation Game but what its all about. Yes, Alan Turing was a real guy who thought far ahead of his time. In perhaps the most famous paper of computer Science Turing asks the famous questing, "Can Machines think?". He suggests an experiment which till date is regarded as the benchmark for how good an artifical intelligence algorithm is. Yes, it is the genius of this guy we have the very idea of synthesizing intelligence!
On certain formal properties of grammars(Chomsky, N)
We all remember the graduation course we all took on Theory of Computation. Yes, Noam Chomsky and his this famous research paper is to be put at blame. Regardless you liked it or not, this paper will make you apperciate the creativity of the guy who classified languages and gave is symbolic representation that gave way to development of how modern compilers work. In his words,"Colourless green ideas sleep furiously".
A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)(David A. Patterson, Garth Gibson, Randy H. Katz)
In this paper David and Garth put forward the idea of introducing data redundancy to improve performance fault tolerance. Modern hard drives work in this way and use the concept of disk mirroring. In modern literature the work inexpensive has been replaced by independant. The 6 RAID levels when introduced was an exponential leap in the harddrive performance. Though with the rise of SSDs RAID is more than obselete but it is worth a while to go through it
YACC: Yet another compiler-compiler (Stephen C. Johnson)
All this now follows a line. YACC was a program original written in B, later rewritten in C. It an LALR parser or a Look Ahead form Left to Right. The impact it had on the compiler designing makes it serves as an assignment in Compiler Designer course in many universities. It is now an integral part to Unix like machines
SEQUEL: A structured English query language (Donald D. Chamberlin, Raymond F. Boyce)
This is the paper that gave birth to the modern SQL. Chamberlin took inspiration from the Ted Cott about his relational modelling of data. This revolutionized the way forever the way we get data from the database. Little clauses have been added since then. Some itellectuals people believe that the modern SQL deviates from the principles laid down in this paper. D is an alternative to SQL.
A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public Key Cryptosystems (Rivest, R. L.; Shamir, A.; Adleman, L.)
Ever thought of telling the your credit card pin to the public. These boys came up with one such idea that was a breakthrought in the cryptography systems. The mathematical elegance this paper narrates is remarable. RSA algorithm which works under the hood each time you make request for some resource over the internet, a lot goes with keys being exchanged publicly, some SHA rounds, computation of encryption keys. This is cryptography 101. A must read for everyone who wants to see the mating of maths and computers.