This introduction to recent developments in algebraic combinatorics illustrates how research in mathematics actually progresses. The author recounts the dramatic search for and discovery of a proof of a counting formula conjectured in the late 1970s: the number of n x n alternating sign matrices, objects that generalize permutation matrices. While it was apparent that the conjecture must be true, the proof was elusive. As a result, researchers became drawn to this problem and made connections to aspects of the invariant theory of Jacobi, Sylvester, Cayley, MacMahon, Schur, and Young; to...

A collection of the best from Mathematics Magazine. Gems from past issues of Mathematics Magazine or the Monthly or the College Mathematics Journal are read with pleasure when they appear, but get pushed into the background when the next issues arrive. So from time to time it is rewarding to go back and see just what marvellous material has been published over the years. There is history of mathematics (algebraic, numbers, inequalities, probability, and the Lebesgue integral, quaternions, Polya's enumeration theorem, and group theory) and history of mathematicians (Hypatia, Gauss, E. T. Bell,...