''Experimental Mathematics'' is a quarterly

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 ...

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 ...

published by A K Peters, Ltd. until 2010, now by

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group is an international company originating in England that publishes books and academic journals. Its parts include Taylor & Francis, Routledge, F1000 (publisher), F1000 Research or Dovepress. It is a division of Informa ...

. The journal publishes papers in

experimental mathematics Experimental mathematics is an approach to mathematics in which computation is used to investigate mathematical objects and identify properties and patterns. It has been defined as "that branch of mathematics that concerns itself ultimately with th ...

, broadly construed. The journal's mission statement describes its scope as follows: "Experimental Mathematics publishes original papers featuring formal results inspired by experimentation, conjectures suggested by experiments, and data supporting significant hypotheses." the

editor-in-chief An editor-in-chief (EIC), also known as lead editor or chief editor, is a publication's editorial leader who has final responsibility for its operations and policies. The highest-ranking editor of a publication may also be titled editor, managing ...

Sergei Tabachnikov Sergei Tabachnikov, also spelled Serge, (in Russian: Сергей Львович Табачников; born in 1956) is a Russian mathematician who works in geometry and dynamical systems. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvan ...

(

ICERM The Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM), founded in 2011, is an American research institute in mathematics at Brown University, funded beginning in 2010 by a grant from the National Science Foundation. A ...

, Brown University).

History

''Experimental Mathematics'' was established in 1992 by David Epstein, Silvio Levy, and Klaus Peters. ''Experimental Mathematics'' was the first mathematical research journal to concentrate on

and to explicitly acknowledge its importance for

as a general research field. The journal's launching was described as "something of a watershed". Indeed, the launching of the journal in 1992 was surrounded by some controversy in the mathematical community about the value and validity of experimentation in mathematical research.James Robert Brown
Philosophy of Mathematics: Introduction to a World of Proofs and Pictures.

, 1999. ; pages 186–187. Some critics of the new journal suggested that it be renamed as the "Journal of Unproved Theorems". In a 1995 article in the ''Notices of the American Mathematical Society'', in part responding to such criticism, Epstein and Levy described the journal's aims as follows:

But the main difference reflects the philosophy above: we are interested not only in theorems and proofs but also in the way in which they have been or can be reached. Note that we do value proofs: experimentally inspired results that can be proved are more desirable than conjectural ones. However, we do publish significant conjectures or explorations in the hope of inspiring other, perhaps better-equipped researchers to carry on the investigation. The objective of Experimental Mathematics is to play a role in the discovery of formal proofs, not to displace them.

In recent years a number of other research journals in pure mathematics have substantially expanded their coverage of experimental mathematics and new journals devoted in large part to experimental mathematics have been launched. Thus, in 1998 the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh Mathematical S ...

launched ''

LMS Journal of Computation and Mathematics ''LMS Journal of Computation and Mathematics'' was a peer-reviewed online mathematics journal covering computational aspects of mathematics published by the London Mathematical Society. The journal published its first article in 1998 and ceased op ...

'' and in 2004 the ''

Journal of Algebra ''Journal of Algebra'' (ISSN 0021-8693) is an international mathematical research journal in algebra. An imprint of Academic Press, it is published by Elsevier. ''Journal of Algebra'' was founded by Graham Higman, who was its editor from 1964 to 1 ...

'' started a new section called "Computational Algebra". ''LMS Journal of Computation and Mathematics'' was closed to new submissions in October 2015. LMS Journal of Computation and Mathematics.
Accessed April 25, 2016. Despite the initial controversy, ''Experimental Mathematics'' quickly established a solid reputation and is now a highly respected mathematical publication. The journal is reviewed cover-to-cover in ''

Mathematical Reviews ''Mathematical Reviews'' is a journal published by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) that contains brief synopses, and in some cases evaluations, of many articles in mathematics, statistics, and theoretical computer science. The AMS also pu ...

'' and ''

Zentralblatt MATH zbMATH Open, formerly Zentralblatt MATH, is a major reviewing service providing reviews and abstracts for articles in pure and applied mathematics, produced by the Berlin office of FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructur ...

'' and is indexed in the Web of Science.

References

External links

*{{Official website, https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uexm20 Mathematics journals Publications established in 1992 Quarterly journals English-language journals Experimental mathematics