History of CMAM

by Almas Sherbaf

Computational Methods in Applied Mathematics (CMAM)
ISSN 1609-4840
(http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cmam)

In the far-off year of 2000, the Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Belarus reached a decision to start a new international scientific journal. Their main motivation was to strengthen international cooperation in the field of numerical analysis. A prominent figure in computational mathematics and mathematical physics, academician Alexander Samarskii, agreed to head the new project; a little later, the internationally-known numerical analyst Vidar Thomee also lent his support. At that time it was very challenging to establish a new journal; nevertheless in 2001 the new scientific journal, named “Computational Methods in Applied Mathematics” (CMAM), began to appear.

The authority and high scientific reputation of such significant figures as Alexander Samarskii and Vidar Thomee helped in assembling the very prestigious CMAM Editorial Board, which consisted of many well-known numerical analysts from all over the world. This board established a high scientific standard for incoming papers. Professor Piotr Matus was the energetic CMAM Managing Editor; he put great effort into the development of the journal.

CMAM’s subject areas included initial and boundary value problems for ordinary and partial differential equations and integral equations from applied mathematics and mathematical physics. Theoretical contributions, numerical algorithms and computer simulations all lay within the scope of the journal.

A social aspect of CMAM was the bringing together of the work of Eastern and Western scientists in the field of numerical analysis. The journal was intended to play an active role in this endeavor. The diversity of the journal’s Editorial Board and of its published papers gave abundant evidence of its success.

In 2003 the CMAM Editorial Board decided to hold biennial international conferences entitled “Computational Methods in Applied Mathematics” under the aegis of the journal. The scope of these conferences would coincide with the scope of the journal described above. Such conferences aimed in particular at fostering cooperation between researchers working in the area of theoretical numerical analysis and those using numerical analysis in modeling, simulation, and scientific computing. Another goal of these CMAM meetings was to establish new contacts and improve existing ones between numerical analysts from West and East. The conferences also make it feasible to invite numerical analysts to submit their manuscripts to CMAM.

This year, 2014, the sixth CMAM conference will be held in Strobl, Austria. The previous meetings were in Minsk (2003); Trakai, Lithuania (2005); Minsk (2007); Bedlewo, Poland (2010); and Berlin (2012).

At the CMAM-3 conference in Minsk, Professor Vidar Thomee was named Honorary Editor of CMAM in recognition of his strong influence and committed involvement and his pioneering efforts in starting the journal.

The current structure of the CMAM Editorial Board is as follows: an Editor-in-Chief (Professor Carsten Carstensen), four Senior Editors (Ivan Gavrilyuk, Ulrich Langer, Piotr Matus, and Petr Vabishchevich) and several Associate Editors.

Today, Computational Methods in Applied Mathematics (CMAM) is a highly selective international mathematical journal that considers original mathematical contributions to computational methods and numerical analysis with applications mainly related to PDEs.

The CMAM journal is published by the famous publishing house of De Gruyter in Berlin, Germany. It is abstracted/indexed by all the main international mathematical information services including Elsevier-SCOPUS, Zentralblatt Math, Mathematical Reviews (MathSciNet), Referativnyi Zhurnal (VINITI), EBSCO Discovery Service, DBLP Computer Science Bibliography, Google Scholar, etc. At present the application of CMAM with ThomsonReuters for inclusion in the Journal Citation Report is ongoing. In the MathSciNet database, CMAM has an MCQ (Mathematical Citation Quotient) of 0.43, while the average MCQ over all journals is 0.39. Among CMAM authors can be found the names of well-known numerical analysts such as Vidar Thomee, Ian Sloan, Willy Dorfler, Susanne Brenner, Carsten Carstensen, Raytcho Lazarov, Panayot Vassilevski, Martin Stynes, Ulrich Langer, Rolf Grigorieff and many others.

CMAM is a De Gruyter journal with a short process time and a short backlog of manuscripts, with (almost) no space restrictions. Older papers can be downloaded online and new issues of the journal are distributed by De Gruyter; see http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cmam.