Experimental Mathematics -- The Journal
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg95234] Experimental Mathematics -- The Journal
- From: <j.marr at cox.net>
- Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:39:55 -0500 (EST)
All: Given the interest in and comments about experimental mathematics, surfaced during this morning's meeting, I'd like to offer all of you a link to the journal Experimental Mathematics: http://www.expmath.org/ . >From the journal's statement of philosophy page: "Experimental Mathematics publishes original papers featuring formal results inspired by experimentation, conjectures suggested by experiments, and data supporting significant hypotheses. "Experiment has always been, and increasingly is, an important method of mathematical discovery. (Gauss declared that his way of arriving at mathematical truths was "through systematic experimentation.") Yet this tends to be concealed by the tradition of presenting only elegant, fully developed, and rigorous results. "Experimental Mathematics was founded in the belief that theory and experiment feed on each other, and that the mathematical community stands to benefit from a more complete exposure to the experimental process. The early sharing of insights increases the possibility that they will lead to theorems: An interesting conjecture is often formulated by a researcher who lacks the techniques to formalize a proof, while those who have the techniques at their fingertips have been looking elsewhere. Even when the person who had the initial insight goes on to find a proof, a discussion of the heuristic process can be of help, or at least of interest, to other researchers. There is value not only in the discovery itself, but also in the road that leads to it." Enjoy! Best Regards, Joe