My goal here is to create a list of historic papers in many fields.

The famous article by Alan Turing
Computing Machinery and Intelligence is a famous paper written by Alan Turing in 1950 at MIND.

The fist paper on machine learning
An inductive inference machine (longer version here) by Ray Solomonoff. Emphasized the importance of training sequences, and the use of parts of previous solutions to problems in constructing trial solutions to new problems.

The two most cited statistics papers
1. Nonparametric Estimation from Incomplete Observations by Edward Kaplan and Paul Meier. This paper introduced what is now know nas Kaplan-Meier estimator 🙂
2. Regression Models and Life-Tables by David Cox. This work expanded the survival analyses of Kaplan and Meier to include factors such as gender and age.

Famous article of one of the fathers of genetics
Experiment in plant hybridization, by Gregor Mendel in 1865.
It’s important to mention that Mendel mentioned in this paper that the data were from a subset of his experiments, a reason for why several critics at his work were made afterwards, for his data looked just too good, something that would be considered very wrong today.

Major contribution towards the solution of the inverse probability problem
An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, by [postmortem] Thomas Bayes in 1763.

The first contributions towards the concept of correlation
1. Analyse mathématique sur les probabilités des erreurs de situation d’un point [Mathematical analysis of the probabilities of errors in a point’s location], by Auguste Bravais in 1846.
2. Co-Relations and Their Measurement, Chiefly from Anthropometric Data, by Francis Galton in 1888.