Chinese Acrobatics , an Old-Time Brewery , and the “ Much Needed Gap ” : The Life of Mathematical Reviews

Since its founding in 1940, Mathematical Reviews has been an important part of the AMS and the mathematical sciences community. Sweeping in scope, solemn in tone, and deadly accurate , MR has led multitudes to what they were searching for in the literature of mathematics and allied areas. Mathematicians have come to rely on this stalwart guide for information on work in a particular area or by a particular author, as well as for bibliographic references. Over the years the AMS has devoted attention and resources to making MR as useful as possible. While you cannot please everybody all the time, MR has consistently provided high-quality information through a variety of media. The lat-est addition to the MR menu of services is Math-SciNet, which provides access to the MR database through the World Wide Web. The reaction to MathSciNet has been enthusiastic. In 1990 Science Citation Index did a study of the aging of references and concluded that citations of work in molecular biology had a " half-life " of months, while work in mathematics had a half-life of at least decades. There are many examples of old mathematical results spurring developments at the frontier of research. Reference works like MR therefore become crucial to progress in the field. At the other end of the spectrum , as technology makes publishing easier for groups and individuals, it becomes ever more important to have a way of organizing and preserving the literature. The AMS in the coming years will continue to invest in Mathematical Reviews to ensure that it remains a high-quality guide to the literature, both past and present. This article describes Mathematical Reviews—its functions, its foibles, its folklore, its future—so that mathematicians who use MR will have a better understanding of this journal that has become such an important part of mathematical life. The two main mathematical reviewing journals today—MR and Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete—were both founded by Otto Neugebauer. He started Zentralblatt in the early 1930s and also launched the book series Ergeb-nisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete and, with W. Flugge, Zentralblatt für Mechanik. These ventures, valuable as they were, were by no means Neugebauer's main accomplishments. His first love was the history of ancient and medieval mathematics and astronomy, and at Brown University he built a leading center for the history of the exact sciences. A scholar versed in the interpretation of cuneiform texts, …