Discrete Mathematics (journal)

For the area of mathematics, see Discrete mathematics.

Discrete Mathematics
Abbreviated title (ISO)	Discrete Math.
Discipline	Mathematics
Peer-reviewed	Yes
Language	English
Edited by	Douglas B. West
Publication details
Publisher	Elsevier
Publication history	1971–present
Frequency	24 issues per year
Impact factor (2010)	0.548
Indexing
ISSN	0012-365X

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 articles. 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.

History

The journal was established in 1971, under the leadership of Peter Hammer, 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.

Editorial board

• Douglas B. West, University of Illinois, Urbana (Editor-in-chief)
• Wayne Goddard, Clemson University (Managing editor)

Associate editors

• Ezra Miller, Duke University
• Bojan Mohar, Simon Fraser University
• Dhruv Mubayi, University of Illinois, Chicago
• Igor Pak, University of California, Los Angeles
• Kenneth Rosen, AT&T Labs
• Douglas Stinson, University of Waterloo

Notable publications

• The 1972 paper by László Lovász made a breakthrough in the study of perfect graphs.^[1]
• The 1973 short note "Acyclic orientations of graphs" by Richard Stanley led to a breakthrough in the study of the chromatic polynomial and its generalizations.^[2]
• Václav Chvátal introduced graph toughness in his classic 1973 Discrete Mathematics article.^[3]
• The 1975 pioneer paper by László Lovász on the linear programming relaxation for the set cover problem. The paper remains top 10 most cited paper in the journal, having been referenced over 500 times.^[4]
• The first, and so far the only mathematics paper by Bill Gates (joint with Christos Papadimitriou), on the subject of pancake sorting was published by Discrete Mathematics in 1979, written while he was an undergraduate at Harvard.^[5][6]
• The 1980 paper by Philippe Flajolet on the combinatorics of continued fractions remains one the most cited papers in the area.^[7]
• The 1985 paper by Bressoud and Zeilberger proved Andrews's q-Dyson conjecture.^[8]

References

1. ^ Lovász, László (1972). "Normal hypergraphs and the perfect graph conjecture". Discrete Mathematics 2 (3): 253–267. doi:10.1016/0012-365X(72)90006-4. 
2. ^ Stanley, R. P. (1973). "Acyclic orientations of graphs". Disc. Math. 5 (2): 171–178. doi:10.1016/0012-365X(73)90108-8. 
3. ^ Chvátal, Václav (1973). "Tough graphs and Hamiltonian circuits". Discrete Mathematics 5 (3): 215–228. doi:10.1016/0012-365X(73)90138-6. MR0316301. 
4. ^ Citations, from Google Scholar.
5. ^ Gates, W. and Papadimitriou, C., "Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal.", Discrete Mathematics. 27, 47-57, 1979.
6. ^ Pancake Sorting, Ivars Peterson, Mathematical Association of America, September 4 , 2006: “It's the only technical paper that Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, ever published.”
7. ^ P. Flajolet, Combinatorial aspects of continued fractions, Discrete Math. 32 (1980), 125–161.
8. ^ Zeilberger, Doron; Bressoud, David M. (1985). "A proof of Andrews' q-Dyson conjecture". Discrete Mathematics 54 (2): 201–224. doi:10.1016/0012-365X(85)90081-0. ISSN 0012-365X. MR791661. 

External links

• Journal website
• Submission page