PRESIDENT'S REPORT FOR VOLUME 53

Mushroom Billiards, Volume 53, Number 3

334 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 53, NUMBER 3 T wo 20th century discoveries transformed scientists’ understanding of nonlinear phenomena [16]. One was KolmogorovArnold-Moser (KAM) theory, which demonstrated the stability of regular dynamics for small perturbations of Hamiltonian systems [4, 5, 11, 15]. The other was the theory of stochasticity of dynamical systems (loosely called “chaos theory”), ...

Measuring Journals, Volume 53, Number 9

The impact factor was created in the late 1950s as a way to measure a journal’s value by calculating the average number of citations per article over a specific period of time. Since citations generally reflect the interest of scholars in an article, the impact factor ought to reflect the average interest in articles appearing in a journal. This seems to be a sensible use of citations. But the ...

The Incompleteness Theorem, Volume 53, Number 4

414 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 53, NUMBER 4 I n September 1930 in Königsberg, on the third day of a symposium devoted to the foundations of mathematics, the young Kurt Gödel launched his bombshell announcing his incompleteness theorem. At that time, there were three recognized “schools” on the foundations of mathematics: the logicism based on the work of Frege, Russell, and Whitehead that saw ma...

Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Death: Closing the Constitution's Succession Gap

Underwriting the presidents.

The United States has had 43 presidents. We examined whether they survive significantly longer or shorter than their contemporaries. We found that survival was better for presidents elected in the 1789-1841 and 1933-2001 periods (SMRs of 0.7 and 0.6, respectively), but worse for those elected in 1845-1929 (SMR = 2.9). We also found increased mortality during the years lived in office (SMR = 1.4...