Observation of Single Top Quark Production at the Tevatron Collider

On March 4, 2009, the DZero and CDF collaborations at Fermilab's Tevatron Collider submitted papers to Physical Review Letters announcing observation of single top quark production. This review paper describes the successful searches carried out independently by the two collaborations, allowing the reader to see the similarities and differences that led to the simultaneous discoveries. Both collaborations measured a cross section sigma(ppbar->tb+X,tqb+X) consistent with the standard model prediction at 5.0 standard deviation significance, and set a lower limit on the quark mixing matrix element |V_tb| without assuming matrix unitarity with three quark generations.