Example of a Mathematician/Physicist whose Other Publications during their PhD eclipsed their PhD Thesis

I would contend that Claude Shannon's Master's thesis, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" (1936) far overshadows his PhD thesis, "An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics" (1940). I'm not exactly sure how reliable Google Scholar citation counts are, but for what it's worth, it lists 1423 citations for the former and only 89 for the latter.

EDITED TO ADD:

While Alan Turing's PhD Thesis, "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals" (1938), introduced the concept of ordinal logic and also oracle machines, I suggest that it barely compares to the impact of his earlier paper, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (1937).

Anatoly Karatsuba discovered the Karatsuba algorithm in 1960, and reported it to Kolmogorov who published it under his (Karatsuba's) name without his knowledge. It seems fair to say that this first example of a "divide and conquer" algorithm eclipsed Karatsuba's 1966 thesis on "The method of trigonometric sums and intermediate value theorems".

For a physics example (from my own university) I note George Uhlenbeck, who with Goudsmit introduced the electron spin in a 1925 publication, while his 1927 Ph.D. thesis on quantum statistics was much less influential. (Here is the story how two Ph.D. students discovered the electron spin, which was missed by a giant like Pauli.)

My father, mathematical economist Harold Kuhn, wrote his 1950 Princeton PhD thesis under the supervision of knot theorist Ralph Fox, leading to publication [Subgroup theorems for groups presented by generators and relations. Ann. of Math. (2) 56, (1952). 22–46.]. MathSciNet lists this with 5 citations as I type this.

Meanwhile, in his last year and half at Princeton, he was starting his very fruitful collaboration with Al Tucker. Their joint 1952 paper Nonlinear programming, in a conference proceedings from a 1950 conference has hundreds of citations on MathSciNet, as does a single authored paper from 1953 On extensive games and the problem of information. Published announcements of all of this, and also work with Dave Gale appeared back in 1950 and 1951.