Comment by foldr
9 hours ago
It varies a lot by field, but in many (not all) scientific fields, a PhD thesis is largely a formality these days. Your publication record is what counts. The days where you could get a tenure track faculty position just on the strength of a PhD thesis are long gone.
Depends on the subfields. CS is by publication, number theory varies ("my students can find a stapler" to the dissertation has revolutionary result not published elsewhere)
CS can (but not frequently) have the revolutionary result you mention as well. A candidate Fully Homomorphic Encryption scheme was first detailed in Craig Gentry's thesis, for example. That being said, this is much less common than a
1. literal stapler thesis, or
2. cleaned up version of a stapler thesis (e.g. rewrite of several previous publications to give broader context etc)
Cryptography is closer to math than most CS disciplines institutionally.
that's how i understand it. it's a portfolio with front matter, back matter, the papers that got published with some connective tissue between them and maybe some discussion of the things that didn't work out and why.