The Mathematical Intelligencer

Last updated

History

The journal was started informally in 1971 by Walter Kaufmann-Buehler and Alice and Klaus Peters. [2] "Intelligencer" was chosen by Kaufmann-Buehler as a word that would appear slightly old-fashioned. [3] An exploration of mathematically themed stamps, written by Robin Wilson, became one of its earliest columns. [4] Prior to 1977, articles of the Intelligencer were not contained in regular volumes and were sent out sporadically to those on a mailing list. [5] To gauge interest, the inaugural mailing included twelve thousand people of whom four thousand requested further copies via postcard. One of the latter was André Weil, who mocked the mailing's admittedly idiosyncratic typography. [6]

In 1978, the founders appointed Bruce Chandler and Harold "Ed" Edwards Jr. to serve jointly in the role of editor-in-chief. The volumes started again with 0 (introductory volume in August 1977) and the first issue of volume 1 appeared in March 1978.

Subsequent editors-in-chief were John Ewing from 1979 to 1986, Sheldon Axler from 1987 to 1991, and Chandler Davis from 1991 to 2004. [6] Beginning in 2004, Davis shared editing responsibilities with long-time contributor Marjorie Senechal. She became the sole editor on Davis's retirement in 2013 and continued to edit the journal through the end of 2020. [4] Parshall and Tabachnikov took over from her in 2021.

Almost from the beginning, the journal's editors have shown a “willingness to deal with controversial topics.” [6] For example, Chandler and Edwards excerpted Morris Kline's controversial 1977 book, Why the Professor Can’t Teach, prompting numerous reactions. Their successor, Ewing, acknowledged that “the purpose of the Intelligencer remains the same: to inform, to entertain, and to provoke." [6] Axler was even more categorical: “Controversies can make for interesting reading, especially in mathematics where we rarely argue about the scientific validity of a result. … [They] keep the publication edgy.” [6] Indeed, Axler identified at least three controversies that erupted during his editorship. One was a book review by Steven Krantz in 1989 which expanded to criticize research interest in fractals; "Fractal geometry has not solved any problems. It is not even clear that it has created any new ones." This prompted Benoit Mandelbrot to publish a rebuttal in the same journal. [7] The rebuttal format was initially planned for a paper accepted by Senechal that was authored by Theodore Hill and Sergei Tabachnikov on the variability hypothesis. In the end, however, it was not published. Further controversy arose when a revised version of the paper, by Hill alone, was published by The New York Journal of Mathematics but then retracted without a notice. [8]

Contents

The Mathematical Intelligencer publishes a variety of contributions on and about mathematics. [9] In addition to articles of a strictly mathematical nature, shorter “notes,” poetry, short fiction, and the occasional interview, the journal currently features regular columns on the history of mathematics (“Years Ago” overseen by Jemma Lorenat), humor (“Mathematically Bent” written by Colin Adams), “Mathematical Gems and Curiosities” (edited by Valentin Ovsienko and Sophie Morier-Genoud), “Mathematical Communities” (edited by Marjorie Senechal), “The Mathematical Tourist” (edited by Ma. Louise Antonette De Las Peñas), and mathematics on stamps (“Stamp Corner” edited by Robin Wilson). Long-time contributor, Jim Henle also authored a column on “Cucina Matematica” until 2015 as well as, until 2022, one “For Our Mathematical Pleasure.” [10] Under John McCleary, the book review section covers books, both non-fiction and fiction, of interest to the mathematically inclined.

Reception

The Mathematical Intelligencer has been described as a journal that publishes articles about front-line research rather than research per se. [11] In 2001, Branislav Kisacanin opined that it belongs in "every good mathematics library". [12] Apart from the Intelligencer's main articles, a humor column written by mathematician Colin Adams has also been well received. [13]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Gardner</span> American mathematics and science writer (1914–2010)

Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing magic, scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literature – especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was a leading authority on Lewis Carroll; The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and in 1999, MAGIC magazine named him as one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century". He was considered the doyen of American puzzlers. He was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wacław Sierpiński</span> Polish mathematician (1882–1969)

Wacław Franciszek Sierpiński was a Polish mathematician. He was known for contributions to set theory, number theory, theory of functions, and topology. He published over 700 papers and 50 books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clifford A. Pickover</span> American inventor and author (b. 1957)

Clifford Alan Pickover is an American author, editor, and columnist in the fields of science, mathematics, science fiction, innovation, and creativity. For many years, he was employed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York, where he was editor-in-chief of the IBM Journal of Research and Development. He has been granted more than 700 U.S. patents, is an elected Fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and is author of more than 50 books, translated into more than a dozen languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dragon curve</span> Fractal constructible with L-systems

A dragon curve is any member of a family of self-similar fractal curves, which can be approximated by recursive methods such as Lindenmayer systems. The dragon curve is probably most commonly thought of as the shape that is generated from repeatedly folding a strip of paper in half, although there are other curves that are called dragon curves that are generated differently.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">European Mathematical Society</span> Mathematical society

The European Mathematical Society (EMS) is a European organization dedicated to the development of mathematics in Europe. Its members are different mathematical societies in Europe, academic institutions and individual mathematicians. The current president is Jan Philip Solovej, professor at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Copenhagen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timothy Noah</span> American journalist and author

Timothy Robert Noah is an American journalist, author, and a staff writer at The New Republic. Previously he was labor policy editor for Politico, a contributing writer at MSNBC.com, a senior editor of The New Republic assigned to write the biweekly "TRB From Washington" column, and a senior writer at Slate, where for a decade he wrote the "Chatterbox" column. In April 2012, Noah published a book, The Great Divergence, about income inequality in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robin Wilson (mathematician)</span> British mathematician (born 1943)

Robin James Wilson is an English mathematician. He is an emeritus professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Open University, having previously been Head of the Pure Mathematics Department and Dean of the Faculty. He was a stipendiary lecturer at Pembroke College, Oxford and, from 2004 to 2008, Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London. On occasion, he teaches at Colorado College in the United States. He is also a long standing fellow of Keble College, Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chandler Davis</span> Canadian mathematician and writer (1926–2022)

Horace Chandler Davis was an American-Canadian mathematician, writer, educator, and left-wing political activist. The socialist magazine Jacobin described Davis as "an internationally esteemed mathematician, a minor science fiction writer of note, and among the most celebrated political prisoners in the United States during the years of the high Cold War."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis Kauffman</span> American mathematician

Louis Hirsch Kauffman is an American mathematician, mathematical physicist, and professor of mathematics in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He does research in topology, knot theory, topological quantum field theory, quantum information theory, and diagrammatic and categorical mathematics. He is best known for the introduction and development of the bracket polynomial and the Kauffman polynomial.

The New York Journal of Mathematics is a peer-reviewed journal focusing on algebra, analysis, geometry and topology. Its editorial board, as of 2018, consists of 17 university-affiliated scholars in addition to the Editor-in-chief. Articles in the New York Journal of Mathematics are published entirely electronically. The journal uses the diamond open access model—that is, its full content is available to anyone via the Internet, without a subscription or fee.

The Fibonacci Quarterly is a scientific journal on mathematical topics related to the Fibonacci numbers, published four times per year. It is the primary publication of The Fibonacci Association, which has published it since 1963. Its founding editors were Verner Emil Hoggatt Jr. and Alfred Brousseau; the present editor is Professor Curtis Cooper of the Mathematics Department of the University of Central Missouri.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Dauben</span> American historian

Joseph Warren Dauben is a Herbert H. Lehman Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 1972. His PhD thesis The early development of Cantorian Set Theory was supervised by Dirk Struik.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steven G. Krantz</span> American mathematician

Steven George Krantz is an American scholar, mathematician, and writer. He has authored more than 350 research papers and published more than 150 books. Additionally, Krantz has edited journals such as the Notices of the American Mathematical Society and The Journal of Geometric Analysis.

In a publishing career spanning 80 years (1930–2010), popular mathematics and science writer Martin Gardner (1914–2010) authored or edited over 100 books and countless articles, columns and reviews.

Mohamed El Naschie is an Egyptian engineer and the former editor of a controversial journal, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. The controversy concerned El Naschie's publication, over many years, of over 300 papers of questioned scientific merit authored by himself in his own journal with little or no apparent peer review. Published reports of his eventual departure from the journal's editorship led to a lengthy libel court case that raised questions about the libel laws in Great Britain. The controversy has also played a role in discussions of the "impact factor" as a quality measure for scientific journals and of the methodology of university rankings.

Karen Hunger Parshall is an American historian of mathematics. She is the Commonwealth Professor of History and Mathematics at the University of Virginia with a joint appointment in the Corcoran Department of History and Department of Mathematics. From 2009 to 2012, Parshall was the Associate Dean for the Social Sciences in the College of Arts in Sciences at UVA, and from 2016 to 2019 she was the chair of the Corcoran Department of History.

Marjorie Lee Senechal is an American mathematician and historian of science, the Louise Wolff Kahn Professor Emerita in Mathematics and History of Science and Technology at Smith College and editor-in-chief of The Mathematical Intelligencer. In mathematics, she is known for her work on tessellations and quasicrystals; she has also studied ancient Parthian electric batteries and published several books about silk.

Madhur Anand is a Canadian poet and professor of ecology and environmental sciences. She was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario and lives in Guelph, Ontario.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moritz Epple</span> German mathematician and historian of science

Moritz Epple is a German mathematician and historian of science.

Umberto Bottazzini is an Italian historian of mathematics, writing on the history of mathematics and the foundations of mathematics.

References

  1. ↑ Steckles, Katie (2016-11-25). "Maths Journals for an engaged Sixth Former". The Aperiodical. Retrieved 2019-09-15.
  2. ↑ Senechal, Marjorie (2018). "The Mathematical Intelligencer Turns Forty!". The Mathematical Intelligencer. 40: 1–3. doi: 10.1007/s00283-018-9791-9 .
  3. ↑ Senechal, Marjorie (2008). "Happy birthday!". The Mathematical Intelligencer. 30: 6. doi: 10.1007/BF02985749 .
  4. 1 2 "Interview with Marjorie Senechal". College of St Rose. 2007. Retrieved 2019-09-15.
  5. ↑ Heinz Götze (2008). Springer-Verlag: History of a Scientific Publishing House. Springer. p. 319. ISBN   9783540928881 . Retrieved 2019-09-15.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 Senechal, Marjorie (2008). "Happy birthday!". The Mathematical Intelligencer. 30: 7–18. doi: 10.1007/BF02985750 .
  7. ↑ Science at the Frontier, Volume 1. National Academy of Sciences. 1992. p. 63. ISBN   9780309045926.
  8. ↑ Neumann, Marc (2018-09-18). "Kann Mathematik sexistisch sein? Ein Aufsatz über Intelligenzverteilung unter Männern und Frauen wurde in den USA jedenfalls zensuriert". Neue Zürcher Zeitung . Retrieved 2019-09-15.
  9. ↑ See, for example, the issues in volume 42 (2019).
  10. ↑ Both columns may be accessed in the back issues of the journal and at Henle, Jim. "Cucina Matematica" . Retrieved 2020-08-09.
  11. ↑ Steven George Krantz (2005). Mathematical Publishing: A Guidebook. American Mathematical Society. ISBN   9780821872598.
  12. ↑ Branislav Kisacanin (2001) Review of Mathematical Conversations. Mathematical Association of America.
  13. ↑ Kasman, Alex. "Mathematically Bent". Mathematical Fiction. Retrieved 2019-09-15.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.