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Acta Mathematica

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Acta Mathematica
DisciplineMathematics
LanguageEnglish, French, German
Edited byTobias Ekholm
Publication details
History1882–present
Publisher
FrequencyQuarterly
Yes
4.273 (2020)
Standard abbreviations
ISO 4Acta Math.
Indexing
CODENACMAA8
ISSN0001-5962 (print)
1871-2509 (web)
LCCN15001937
OCLC no.01460915
Links

Acta Mathematica is a peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal covering research in all fields of mathematics.

According to Cédric Villani, this journal is "considered by many to be the most prestigious of all mathematical research journals".[1] According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2020 impact factor of 4.273, ranking it 5th out of 330 journals in the category "Mathematics".[2]

Publication history

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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.[3] The journal was printed and distributed by Springer 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

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The journal's "most famous episode" (according to Villani[1]) concerns Henri Poincaré, who won a prize offered in 1887 by Oscar II of Sweden for the best mathematical work concerning the stability of the Solar System by purporting to prove the stability of a special case of the three-body problem. 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"[4] by June Barrow-Green and K.G. Andersson.[5][6] 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.[1]

References

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  1. ^ a b c Cédric Villani (2015), Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, pp. 193–196.
  2. ^ "Journals Ranked by Impact: Mathematics". 2020 Journal Citation Reports. Web of Science (Science ed.). Clarivate. 2021.
  3. ^ Gårding 1998, p. 77.
  4. ^ Daniel L. Goroff (1993), Introduction to the English translation of "Les méthodes nouvelles de la mécanique céleste", American Institute of Physics.
  5. ^ June Barrow-Green (1994), "Oscar II's prize competition and the error in Poincaré's memoir on the three body problem", Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 48 (2): 107–131, Bibcode:1994AHES...48..107B, doi:10.1007/bf00374436, S2CID 120897355
  6. ^ K. G. Andersson (1994), "Poincaré's discovery of homoclinic points", Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 48 (2): 133–147, Bibcode:1994AHES...48..133A, doi:10.1007/bf00374437, S2CID 122609741.

Literature

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