Ouch. I'd say that my shared caches side channel attack work was groundbreaking (although Shamir and his graduate students were only a few months behind me). I'd say that my projective algorithm for matching with mismatches is groundbreaking. The sqrt(5) \epsilon error bound on complex floating-point multiplication shouldn't have been groundbreaking, but apparently was -- I've never seen numerical analysts get so excited about a ~30% reduction in an error bound.
But how do you quantify groundbreaking? A lot of research can't be qualified as such until many years later, after a field has built on the foundation laid by the originator.
