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Discrete Mathematics (journal)
Encyclopedia
Discrete Mathematics is a journal in the broad area of discrete mathematics
, combinatorics
, graph theory
and their applications, published by Elsevier
. It publishes both short notes, full length contributions, as well as survey article
s. In addition, DM publishes a number of special issues each year dedicated to a particular topic, in total 24 regular and special issues a year. All published articles are also available electronically, by subscription. Although originally it allowed publications in French
and German
, it now allows only English language
articles. Like other Elsevier publications, the journal uses an electronic submission system.
, with an advisory board
consisting of Claude Berge
, M. Harrison, Victor Klee
, Jack van Lint
, and Gian-Carlo Rota
. The very first article it published was written by Paul Erdős
, who went on to publish a total of 84 papers in DM.
One of the oldest and leading journals in the field, Discrete Mathematics has published a number of articles by many well known combinatorialists. These include Noga Alon
(25 papers), László Babai
, Béla Bollobás
(41 papers), Leonard Carlitz
, Fan Chung
(10 papers), Václav Chvátal
, Don Coppersmith
, Persi Diaconis
, Philippe Flajolet
, Ron Graham
, Branko Grünbaum
, Richard Guy
, Gil Kalai
, Daniel Kleitman
(25 papers), Donald Knuth
, László Lovász
, Jaroslav Nešetřil
(27 papers), Cheryl Praeger
(11 papers), John Riordan
, Marcel-Paul Schützenberger
, Vera Sós (10 papers), Joel Spencer
, Richard Stanley
, Endre Szemerédi
, W. T. Tutte
, Herb Wilf
, and Doron Zeilberger
(16 papers).
The journal was one of the first in the area of discrete mathematics and remained the broadest.
Over the years it grew enormously along with the growth of the field, reaching the point of publishing 3500 pages per year. Hammer remained the managing editor until his death in 2006. In 2007 the editorial structure was overhauled and the journal became more selective. The new editor-in-chief is Douglas West, with managing editor Wayne Goddard and six associate editors who consider submissions by subfields.
Discrete mathematics
Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that are fundamentally discrete rather than continuous. In contrast to real numbers that have the property of varying "smoothly", the objects studied in discrete mathematics – such as integers, graphs, and statements in logic – do not...
, combinatorics
Combinatorics
Combinatorics is a branch of mathematics concerning the study of finite or countable discrete structures. Aspects of combinatorics include counting the structures of a given kind and size , deciding when certain criteria can be met, and constructing and analyzing objects meeting the criteria ,...
, graph theory
Graph theory
In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs, mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects from a certain collection. A "graph" in this context refers to a collection of vertices or 'nodes' and a collection of edges that connect pairs of...
and their applications, published by Elsevier
Elsevier
Elsevier is a publishing company which publishes medical and scientific literature. It is a part of the Reed Elsevier group. Based in Amsterdam, the company has operations in the United Kingdom, USA and elsewhere....
. It publishes both short notes, full length contributions, as well as survey article
Survey article
In academia, a survey article is a paper that is a work of synthesis, published through the usual channels...
s. In addition, DM publishes a number of special issues each year dedicated to a particular topic, in total 24 regular and special issues a year. All published articles are also available electronically, by subscription. Although originally it allowed publications in French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
and German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, it now allows only English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
articles. Like other Elsevier publications, the journal uses an electronic submission system.
History
The journal was established in 1971, under the leadership of Peter HammerPeter Hammer
Peter L. Hammer was an American mathematician native to Romania. He contributed to the fields of operations research and applied discrete mathematics through the study of pseudo-Boolean functions and their connections to graph theory and data mining.- Biography :Peter Ladislaw Hammer was born in...
, with an advisory board
Advisory board
An advisory board is a body that advises the board of directors and management of a corporation but does not have authority to vote on corporate matters, nor a legal fiduciary responsibility...
consisting of Claude Berge
Claude Berge
Claude Berge was a French mathematician, recognized as one of the modern founders of combinatorics and graph theory. He is particularly remembered for his famous conjectures on perfect graphs and for Berge's lemma, which states that a matching M in a graph G is maximum if and only if there is in...
, M. Harrison, Victor Klee
Victor Klee
Victor L. Klee, Jr. was a mathematician specialising in convex sets, functional analysis, analysis of algorithms, optimization, and combinatorics. He spent almost his entire career at the University of Washington in Seattle.Born in San Francisco, Vic Klee earned his B.A...
, Jack van Lint
Jack van Lint
Jacobus Hendricus van Lint was a Dutch mathematician, professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, of which he was rector magnificus from 1991 till 1996....
, and Gian-Carlo Rota
Gian-Carlo Rota
Gian-Carlo Rota was an Italian-born American mathematician and philosopher.-Life:Rota was born in Vigevano, Italy...
. The very first article it published was written by Paul Erdős
Paul Erdos
Paul Erdős was a Hungarian mathematician. Erdős published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. He worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory...
, who went on to publish a total of 84 papers in DM.
One of the oldest and leading journals in the field, Discrete Mathematics has published a number of articles by many well known combinatorialists. These include Noga Alon
Noga Alon
Noga Alon is an Israeli mathematician noted for his contributions to combinatorics and theoretical computer science, having authored hundreds of papers.- Academic background :...
(25 papers), László Babai
László Babai
László Babai is a Hungarian professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on computational complexity theory, algorithms, combinatorics, and finite groups, with an emphasis on the interactions between these fields...
, Béla Bollobás
Béla Bollobás
Béla Bollobás FRS is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory and percolation. As a student, he took part in the first three International Mathematical Olympiads, winning two gold medals...
(41 papers), Leonard Carlitz
Leonard Carlitz
Leonard Carlitz was an American mathematician. Carlitz supervised 44 Doctorates at Duke University and published over 770 papers.- Chronology :* 1907 Born Philadelphia, PA, USA* 1927 BA, University of Pennsylvania...
, Fan Chung
Fan Chung
Fan Rong K Chung Graham , known professionally as Fan Chung, is a mathematician who works mainly in the areas of spectral graph theory, extremal graph theory and random graphs, in particular...
(10 papers), Václav Chvátal
Václav Chvátal
Václav Chvátal is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, where he holds theCanada Research Chair in Combinatorial Optimization....
, Don Coppersmith
Don Coppersmith
Don Coppersmith is a cryptographer and mathematician. He was involved in the design of the Data Encryption Standard block cipher at IBM, particularly the design of the S-boxes, strengthening them against differential cryptanalysis...
, Persi Diaconis
Persi Diaconis
Persi Warren Diaconis is an American mathematician and former professional magician. He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University....
, Philippe Flajolet
Philippe Flajolet
Philippe Flajolet was a French computer scientist.A former student of École Polytechnique, Philippe Flajolet received his Ph.D. in computer science from University Paris Diderot in 1973 and state doctorate from Paris-Sud 11 University in 1979...
, Ron Graham
Ronald Graham
Ronald Lewis Graham is a mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as being "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years"...
, Branko Grünbaum
Branko Grünbaum
Branko Grünbaum is a Croatian-born mathematician and a professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel....
, Richard Guy
Richard K. Guy
Richard Kenneth Guy is a British mathematician, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Calgary....
, Gil Kalai
Gil Kalai
Gil Kalai is the Henry and Manya Noskwith Professor of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and adjunct professor of mathematics and of computer science at Yale University, and the editor of the Israel Journal of Mathematics.-Biography:...
, Daniel Kleitman
Daniel Kleitman
Daniel J. Kleitman is a professor of applied mathematics at MIT. His research interests include combinatorics, graph theory, genomics, and operations research.- Biography :...
(25 papers), Donald Knuth
Donald Knuth
Donald Ervin Knuth is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms...
, László Lovász
László Lovász
László Lovász is a Hungarian mathematician, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the Wolf Prize and the Knuth Prize in 1999, and the Kyoto Prize in 2010....
, Jaroslav Nešetřil
Jaroslav Nešetril
Jaroslav Nešetřil is a Czech mathematician, working at Charles University in Prague. His research areas include combinatorics , graph theory , algebra , posets , computer science .Nešetřil...
(27 papers), Cheryl Praeger
Cheryl Praeger
Cheryl Elisabeth Praeger, AM is an Australian mathematician. She is currently a professor of mathematics at the University of Western Australia...
(11 papers), John Riordan
John Riordan
John Riordan was an American mathematician and the author of major early works in combinatorics, particularly Introduction to Combinatorial Analysis and Combinatorial Identities.- Life :...
, Marcel-Paul Schützenberger
Marcel-Paul Schützenberger
Marcel-Paul "Marco" Schützenberger was a French mathematician and Doctor of Medicine. His work had impact across the fields of formal language, combinatorics, and information theory...
, Vera Sós (10 papers), Joel Spencer
Joel Spencer
Joel Spencer is an American mathematician. He is a combinatorialist who has worked on probabilistic methods in combinatorics and on Ramsey theory. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1970, under the supervision of Andrew Gleason...
, Richard Stanley
Richard P. Stanley
Richard Peter Stanley is the Norman Levinson Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1971 under the supervision of Gian-Carlo Rota...
, Endre Szemerédi
Endre Szemerédi
Endre Szemerédi is a Hungarian mathematician, working in the field of combinatorics and theoretical computer science. He is the State of New Jersey Professor of computer science at Rutgers University since 1986...
, W. T. Tutte
W. T. Tutte
William Thomas Tutte, OC, FRS, known as Bill Tutte, was a British, later Canadian, codebreaker and mathematician. During World War II he made a brilliant and fundamental advance in Cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major German code system, which had a significant impact on the Allied...
, Herb Wilf
Herbert Wilf
Herbert Saul Wilf is a mathematician, specializing in combinatorics and graph theory. He was the Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics in Combinatorial Analysis and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written numerous books and research papers...
, and Doron Zeilberger
Doron Zeilberger
Doron Zeilberger is an Israeli mathematician, known for his work in combinatorics.He is a Board of Governors Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University...
(16 papers).
The journal was one of the first in the area of discrete mathematics and remained the broadest.
Over the years it grew enormously along with the growth of the field, reaching the point of publishing 3500 pages per year. Hammer remained the managing editor until his death in 2006. In 2007 the editorial structure was overhauled and the journal became more selective. The new editor-in-chief is Douglas West, with managing editor Wayne Goddard and six associate editors who consider submissions by subfields.
Editorial board
- Douglas B. West, University of Illinois, Urbana (Editor-in-chiefEditor in chiefAn editor-in-chief is a publication's primary editor, having final responsibility for the operations and policies. Additionally, the editor-in-chief is held accountable for delegating tasks to staff members as well as keeping up with the time it takes them to complete their task...
) - Wayne Goddard, Clemson UniversityClemson UniversityClemson University is an American public, coeducational, land-grant, sea-grant, research university located in Clemson, South Carolina, United States....
(Managing editorManaging editorA managing editor is a senior member of a publication's management team.In the United States, a managing editor oversees and coordinates the publication's editorial activities...
)
Associate editors
- Ezra Miller, Duke UniversityDuke UniversityDuke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
- Bojan Mohar, Simon Fraser UniversitySimon Fraser UniversitySimon Fraser University is a Canadian public research university in British Columbia with its main campus on Burnaby Mountain in Burnaby, and satellite campuses in Vancouver and Surrey. The main campus in Burnaby, located from downtown Vancouver, was established in 1965 and has more than 34,000...
- Dhruv Mubayi, University of Illinois, Chicago
- Igor PakIgor PakIgor Pak is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, working in combinatorics and discrete probability...
, University of California, Los AngelesUniversity of California, Los AngelesThe University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses... - Kenneth Rosen, AT&T LabsAT&T LabsAT&T Labs, Inc. is the research & development division of AT&T, where scientists and engineers work to understand and advance innovative technologies relevant to networking, communications, and information. Over 1800 employees work in six locations: Florham Park, NJ; Middletown, NJ; Austin, TX;...
- Douglas StinsonDoug StinsonDouglas Robert Stinson is a Canadian mathematician and cryptographer, currently a professor at the University of Waterloo and a member of the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research....
, University of WaterlooUniversity of WaterlooThe University of Waterloo is a comprehensive public university in the city of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The school was founded in 1957 by Drs. Gerry Hagey and Ira G. Needles, and has since grown to an institution of more than 30,000 students, faculty, and staff...
Notable publications
- The 1972 paper by László LovászLászló LovászLászló Lovász is a Hungarian mathematician, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the Wolf Prize and the Knuth Prize in 1999, and the Kyoto Prize in 2010....
made a breakthrough in the study of perfect graphPerfect graphIn graph theory, a perfect graph is a graph in which the chromatic number of every induced subgraph equals the size of the largest clique of that subgraph....
s. - The 1973 short note "Acyclic orientations of graphs" by Richard StanleyRichard P. StanleyRichard Peter Stanley is the Norman Levinson Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1971 under the supervision of Gian-Carlo Rota...
led to a breakthrough in the study of the chromatic polynomialChromatic polynomialThe chromatic polynomial is a polynomial studied in algebraic graph theory, a branch of mathematics. It counts the number of graph colorings as a function of the number of colors and was originally defined by George David Birkhoff to attack the four color problem. It was generalised to the Tutte...
and its generalizations. - Václav ChvátalVáclav ChvátalVáclav Chvátal is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, where he holds theCanada Research Chair in Combinatorial Optimization....
introduced graph toughnessGraph toughnessIn graph theory, toughness is a measure of the connectivity of a graph. A graph is said to be -tough for a given real number if, for every integer , cannot be split into different connected components by the removal of fewer than vertices...
in his classic 1973 Discrete Mathematics article. - The 1975 pioneer paper by László LovászLászló LovászLászló Lovász is a Hungarian mathematician, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the Wolf Prize and the Knuth Prize in 1999, and the Kyoto Prize in 2010....
on the linear programming relaxation for the set cover problemSet cover problemThe set covering problem is a classical question in computer science and complexity theory.It is a problem "whose study has led to the development of fundamental techniques for the entire field" of approximation algorithms...
. The paper remains top 10 most cited paper in the journal, having been referenced over 500 times. - The first, and so far the only mathematics paper by Bill GatesBill GatesWilliam Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
(joint with Christos PapadimitriouChristos PapadimitriouChristos Harilaos Papadimitriou is a Professor in the Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley, United States...
), on the subject of pancake sortingPancake sortingPancake sorting is a variation of the sorting problem in which the only allowed operation is to reverse the elements of some prefix of the sequence. Unlike a traditional sorting algorithm, which attempts to sort with the fewest comparisons possible, the goal is to sort the sequence in as few...
was published by Discrete Mathematics in 1979, written while he was an undergraduate at HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. - The 1980 paper by Philippe FlajoletPhilippe FlajoletPhilippe Flajolet was a French computer scientist.A former student of École Polytechnique, Philippe Flajolet received his Ph.D. in computer science from University Paris Diderot in 1973 and state doctorate from Paris-Sud 11 University in 1979...
on the combinatorics of continued fractionContinued fractionIn mathematics, a continued fraction is an expression obtained through an iterative process of representing a number as the sum of its integer part and the reciprocal of another number, then writing this other number as the sum of its integer part and another reciprocal, and so on...
s remains one the most cited papers in the area. - The 1985 paper by BressoudDavid BressoudDavid Marius Bressoud is an American mathematician who works in number theory, combinatorics, and special functions...
and ZeilbergerDoron ZeilbergerDoron Zeilberger is an Israeli mathematician, known for his work in combinatorics.He is a Board of Governors Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University...
proved Andrews's q-Dyson conjectureDyson conjectureIn mathematics, the Dyson conjecture is a conjecture about the constant term of certain Laurent polynomials, proved by Wilson and Gunson. Andrews generalized it to the q-Dyson conjecture, proved by Zeilberger and Bressoud and sometimes called the Zeilberger–Bressoud theorem...
.