Top Ten Lists

Posted on May 30, 2015 by Edward Dunne

As many in the United States know, David Letterman retired from his late-night television show recently.  Among other things, he was known for his Top Ten Lists.   Well, the mathematically inclined do not have to go without, as MathSciNet has Top Ten Lists!  From the main MathSciNet page http://www.ams.org/mathscinet, click on the Citations tab.  You now have five choices of types of searches ordered by citation, using the citation database built from our Reference List Journals.   Continue reading →

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John Nash

Posted on May 24, 2015 by Edward Dunne

As many of you may have heard by now, John Nash died in a car crash while traveling home from Norway where he had just received the Abel Prize.  Here is the obituary in the New York Times.   Most people are aware of Nash’s work on non-cooperative games, for which he won the Nobel Prize:

Within mathematics, he is equally known for Continue reading →

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Interview in the AMS Notices: Managing the Math Deluge

Posted on May 10, 2015 by Edward Dunne

Allyn Jackson, senior writer and deputy editor of the AMS Notices, interviewed me not long after I became the Executive Editor of Mathematical Reviews.  That interview is in the May 2015 issue  Allyn and I talked about some of the major issues for Mathematical Reviews, particularly the relentless growth of the scientific literature.  You can read it here.

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MathSciNet has book reviews

Posted on May 6, 2015 by Edward Dunne

Most of the reviews in MathSciNet are for articles, primarily from journals, but also from proceedings volumes and other collections.  Did you know that we also review books?  A book-length treatment of a subject allows the author to stretch out his or her thoughts.  You are expected to explain things in more detail.  Be more expansive.  Make more connections.  Discuss the context and the history of the subject.  As a consequence, a review of a book can offer the reviewer the chance to likewise spread out.  Sometimes, a book review can be fun and still fulfill its purpose of telling the reader about what’s in the book.  Here, Debora Di Caprio and Francisco J. Santos-Arteaga team up to review a book about epistemic game theory.  They start their review by talking about a scene from The Princess Bride.  The movie reference is entirely appropriate, and engages the reader quite nicely.   Continue reading →

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An exceptional review of a paper on algebraic geometry, that touches on a host of topics

Posted on May 4, 2015 by Edward Dunne

There are many ways for an article to be exceptional.  A paper by Goulden, Jackson, and Vakil, introduces an idea (double Hurwitz numbers), establishes some properties, conjectures some more, and connects the idea with several areas of mathematics.  A great review of this paper would tell you all these things.  And that is precisely what Hsian-Hua Tseng does. Continue reading →

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Using MathSciNet at home or on the road

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Edward Dunne

In talking with people who use MathSciNet, I have discovered that there are many features that people don’t know about.  One feature that people often ask about is the ability to use MathSciNet from home or on the road.   Well, this is possible, but nobody noticed our clever icon.   In this post, I will show you how to pair a laptop (or other portable device) by going directly to our web page for remote access.  In the meantime, we will be redesigning some of the pointers to these features so that you don’t have to go to a blog to find out how to connect. Continue reading →

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People at Mathematical Reviews

Posted on April 22, 2015 by Edward Dunne

Mathematical Reviews is made by people.  A lot of people.  First of all, roughly 17,000 mathematicians are active reviewers.  These people are located all around the world.  From the very beginning, the reviewers, who are part of the mathematical community,  have been essential to the endeavor.   At the MR offices in Ann Arbor, 78 people perform a variety of tasks behind the scenes.  (And there are some more people at the AMS headquarters in Providence who deal with sales, marketing and promotion.)  To begin with, we have an Acquisitions Department (9 people) who make sure that we receive all the journals, conference proceedings and books that are covered.  This department works closely with the publishers to ensure that their needs are met.  The people in Acquisitions also start the cataloging process.  Since we cover roughly 120,000 items per year, it is very important that we get the cataloging right.   Continue reading →

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A good review of a paper on Kähler-Einstein metrics with prescribed singularities

Posted on April 14, 2015 by Edward Dunne

I am glad to be able to use this blog to highlight some of the really good reviews that appear in MathSciNet.  There are many ways for a review to be helpful.  We offer some advice to reviewers in our Guide to Reviewers.  Generally, a good review describes the context of the article (or book), the main results, and possibly compares it to other work.  This review by Hans-Joachim Hein of a paper by Campana, Guenancia, and Păun has all these qualities. Continue reading →

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Welcome

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Edward Dunne

Welcome to Beyond Reviews, a blog about MathSciNet from the Executive Editor of Mathematical Reviews.  For 75 years, Mathematical Reviews has provided a guide to the mathematical literature and featuring reviews by a community of experts. As this literature continues to grow at an exponential rate, such a guide becomes increasingly important. In 1996 MathSciNet was launched, providing online access to all the reviews from January 1940 to the present. From that point on, you no longer had to go to the library to read the famously large and famously orange volumes. Instead, you could do everything from the computer on your desk. The shift from a bound journal to an online resource was more than just a change in form, there was also a major conceptual shift. Now, you could execute searches through the entirety of Mathematical Reviews because it was a database. When the size of the literature crossed the threshold from large to HUGE, this was definitely a Good Thing. Continue reading →

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