Stability and isolation phenomena for Yang-Mills fields

Construction of instantons

Michael Atiyah, Nigel Hitchin, Vladimir Drinfeld et al. · Physics Letters A · 1978 · 1.5K citations

Self-duality in four-dimensional Riemannian geometry

Michael Atiyah, Nigel Hitchin, I. M. Singer · Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A Mathematical and Physical Sciences · 1978 · 1.5K citations

Natural Sciences, Mathematics, Physics +17

On Manifolds Homeomorphic to the 7-Sphere

John Milnor · Annals of Mathematics · 1956 · 555 citations

Natural Sciences, Mathematics, Geometry +10

A generalized Morse theory

Richard S. Palais, Stephen T. Smale · Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society · 1964 · 300 citations · Full text

Natural Sciences, Mathematics, Computational Geometry +12

Foliations and groups of diffeomorphisms

William P. Thurston · Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society · 1974 · 206 citations · Full text

Natural Sciences, Geophysics, Dynamical Systems +5