Abstracts: Ian Gladwell
ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software — Past, Present and Future
The Association for Computing Machinery’s Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS) was the first Transactions published by the ACM and first appeared in 1975. It grew out of the ACM’s first publications, the Journal of the ACM (JACM) and the Communications of the ACM (CACM). The ACM now publishes CACM, seven journals including JACM, thirty two transactions and a number of magazines and newsletters.
TOMS publishes mainly two types of papers. Algorithms papers describe software that is submitted for publication in ACM’s CALGO (Collected Algorithms of the ACM) software archival repository which dates back to the early days of CACM. Research papers discuss concepts important in the design and implementation of mathematical software and also describe existing mathematical software not submitted for inclusion in CALGO; for example software available in libraries such as HSL and NAG or in large projects such as PETsc and software available directly from the authors which is usually licensed and downloadable from web pages.
We will discuss the development of ACM TOMS since its inception in 1975, through the recent years during which the author has been editor-in-chief and we will outline some possible directions for the near future.