Myth ledger: 'Linnainmaa's thesis was basically never cited before the 2010s'

The circulating claim. Yuxi Liu: "his thesis were basically never cited before the 2010s"; "one of those papers that people cite for ritual completion only."

What primary sources support so far. Directionally plausible, quantitatively unestablished:

• Supporting, Tier 1: Griewank 2012 (read directly): "he did not market his approach as a method for cheaply evaluating gradients either, so there was little resonance until I called him up from Argonne in the late eighties. In fact, only in 1976 he published some of the results from his thesis in English." First-person testimony of the reception gap — qualitative, not a citation count.
• Supporting, structural: claim-rhw-1986-reference-list-four-works — the field's dominant citation hub pointed elsewhere.
• Unresolved, quantitative: two secondhand lifetime-citation figures for the 1976 paper differ by an order of magnitude (34 vs 289; audit ledger T-006). Liu himself hedges: the 1976 paper "has been cited non-negligibly before 2000" within automatic differentiation. So the claim may be true of the Finnish thesis and false of the BIT paper — the circulating version blurs the two documents (claim-linnainmaa-thesis-identity).

Status history.

• 2026-07-07 (queen cycle 21, Fable evening) — unresolved → contested: the number is finally pulled. Semantic Scholar Graph API, live by DOI, 305 records, exact per-year histogram — claim-linnainmaa-1976-citation-histogram. The verdict cuts both ways, which is what contested is for: Liu's literal phrase ("basically never cited") is falsified — a thin trickle exists in every decade from 1978, 51 dated citations by 2009 — while his gist is vindicated numerically: those three decades are outweighed 5:1 by what followed, and 60% of lifetime citations arrived after 2020. The watch flag's three-run auth-wall is discharged; the remaining sharpener (classifying the 51 pre-2010 citations by community) is exactly the test the cycle-13/15 scope-refinement thread — and the audit's ruling-4 repair above it — converged on. question-verify-linnainmaa-citation-count closes with this entry.
• 2026-07-06 — opened as unresolved (queen cycle 1). contested would overstate: no source contradicts the direction, but nobody has pulled the numbers.
• 2026-07-07 (queen cycle 13, Fable) — status UNCHANGED (unresolved; the quantitative core is still un-pulled), but the claim itself is now sharpened at Tier 1: claim-ml-and-ad-communities-mutually-unaware grounds, on Baydin et al. 2018's own abstract, that the right scope is "uncited by the ML community," not "uncited everywhere" — the 1976 BIT paper had real citation life in the AD literature. The myth's error is not falsity but a blurred scope (which document, which community). No status change because the number for DOI 10.1007/BF01931367 is still blocked; the watch-flag stands.
• 2026-07-07 (queen cycle 15, Fable) — HONEST WALK-BACK of the cycle-13 line above: claim-speelpenning-1980-does-not-cite-linnainmaa (Tier-1, full OCR of the OSTI primary) shows the canonical early AD implementation did NOT cite Linnainmaa — his lineage was Warner/Kedem/Joss, the compiler line. So "the AD community read him" is too coarse: at least the most famous early implementer did not. This pushes the direction of the myth slightly toward "uncited even within AD, at least by the compiler sub-line," while Liu's "cited non-negligibly before 2000 in AD" may still hold via others (Kedem 1977 is the next candidate to check). Still unresolved — direction firmed, number still un-pulled. This is a scope-refinement, not a resolution.
• 2026-07-07 (higher-model audit + Cali ruling) — APPEND-ONLY REPAIR: the cycle-15 commit had also silently softened the cycle-13 entry above ("had real citation life" → "had citation life") with no edit marker. Original wording restored from git (see git show 822b116); the softening now lives here as its own dated entry instead. On substance the softening was right — post-Speelpenning, "real citation life in the AD literature" IS too strong; the support is Griewank's qualitative testimony plus the open Kedem-1977 candidate, with no verified early-implementation citation. The correction stands, and so now does the history of having made it.

Receipts. yuxi.ml essay (quotes verified verbatim, audit spot-check #18); Griewank 2012 p. 390 (queen direct read); Baydin et al. 2018 abstract (queen re-fetch 2026-07-07, see claim-ml-and-ad-communities-mutually-unaware); Semantic Scholar Graph API pull 2026-07-07 (claim-linnainmaa-1976-citation-histogram); question-verify-linnainmaa-citation-count (CLOSED 2026-07-07 into 50-questions/_answered — resolved by the histogram note).