McCarthy Math
In early 1959, John McCarthy wrote a little paper that defined one of the first ever programming languages, LISP. In just nine simple functions (QUOTE, ATOM, EQ, CAR, CDR, CONS, COND, LAMBDA, LABEL), he created the basis from which all LISP-like languages are still founded upon today, including Scheme, Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp, Clojure, and (debatably) even JavaScript. The language was so succinct that modern-day programmer orlp was able to fully implement an interpreter for it in Python in just 770 bytes.
