Note that Claude Shannon's MS thesis was about re-discovering the work of an obscure British analytic philosopher, whose work from about 100 years earlier had been almost completely forgotten. (perhaps a few philosophers and mathematicians remembered Boole, but they certainly didn't teach his work to the engineers who had to design relay-based logic circuits back in the pre-transistor days)

>There are on the order of 100 million papers [reference 2] published to date.

Does anyone else feel as if this (admittedly rough) estimate is off by an order of magnitude?