''Acta Mathematica'' is a

peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

open-access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

scientific journal In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research. Content Articles in scientific journals are mostly written by active scientists such as s ...

covering research in all fields of

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

. According to

Cédric Villani Cédric Patrice Thierry Villani (; born 5 October 1973) is a French politician and mathematician working primarily on partial differential equations, Riemannian geometry and mathematical physics. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2010, and he w ...

, this journal is "considered by many to be the most prestigious of all mathematical research journals".. According to the ''

Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Collect ...

'', the journal has a 2020

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as i ...

of 4.273, ranking it 5th out of 330 journals in the category "Mathematics".

Publication history

The journal was established by Gösta Mittag-Leffler in 1882 and is published by Institut Mittag-Leffler, a research institute for mathematics belonging to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The journal was printed and distributed by

Springer Springer or springers may refer to: Publishers * Springer Science+Business Media, aka Springer International Publishing, a worldwide publishing group founded in 1842 in Germany formerly known as Springer-Verlag. ** Springer Nature, a multinationa ...

from 2006 to 2016. Since 2017, Acta Mathematica has been published electronically and in print by International Press. Its electronic version is open access without publishing fees.

Poincaré episode

The journal's "most famous episode" (according to Villani) concerns Henri Poincaré, who won a prize offered in 1887 by

Oscar II of Sweden Oscar II (Oscar Fredrik; 21 January 1829 – 8 December 1907) was King of Sweden from 1872 until his death in 1907 and King of Norway from 1872 to 1905. Oscar was the son of King Oscar I and Queen Josephine. He inherited the Swedish and Norwe ...

for the best mathematical work concerning the

stability of the Solar System The stability of the Solar System is a subject of much inquiry in astronomy. Though the planets have been stable when historically observed, and will be in the short term, their weak gravitational effects on one another can add up in unpredictable ...

by purporting to prove the stability of a special case of the

three-body problem In physics and classical mechanics, the three-body problem is the problem of taking the initial positions and velocities (or momenta) of three point masses and solving for their subsequent motion according to Newton's laws of motion and Newton's ...

. This episode was rediscovered in the 1990s by Daniel Goroff, in his preface to the English translation of "Les méthodes nouvelles de la mécanique céleste" by June Barrow-Green and K.G. Andersson.. The prized or lauded paper was to be published in ''Acta Mathematica'', but after the issue containing the paper was printed, Poincaré found an error that invalidated his proof. He paid more than the prize money to destroy the print run and reprint the issue without his paper, and instead published a corrected paper a year later in the same journal that demonstrated that the system could be unstable. This paper later became one of the foundational works of chaos theory.

References

External links

* {{Authority control Mathematics journals Publications established in 1882 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Multilingual journals Springer Science+Business Media academic journals Quarterly journals