IMA Journal of Management Mathematics (2020) 31, 1–3 doi:10.1093/imaman/dpz017 Editorial Management Mathematics: a retrospective Rogemar Mamon, Phil Scarf and Aris Syntetos The IMA Journal of Management Mathematics will be 35 years old this year. We thought it timely therefore to look at the history of the journal, and review its mission, its achievements, the editors who have served it and its future direction. In so doing, we have selected a number of published papers that collectively mark 35 years of forward-looking research and that illustrate the thematic diversity of the journal. These papers will be made available on the journal website as a virtual issue: ‘The 35-year collection’. The journal was established in 1986 and titled the IMA Journal of Mathematics in Management. This expanded the suite of mathematics journals published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) from five to six journals. The first editorial by the first editors, Roy Stainton and Raymond Cuninghame-Green, makes it very clear that ‘the central position of mathematics and the equal valuation of theory and practice shall be the hallmarks of [the] new journal’ (Cuninghame-Green and Stainton, 1986). This continues to be the guiding principle for all we do in the journal, reflected in the mission ‘...to publish mathematical research of the highest quality, impact and relevance that can be directly utilised or have demonstrable potential to be employed by managers...to improve their practices’. Roy Stainton was Professor of Operational Research at the University of Southampton and was appointed president of the OR Society in 1984. Many later editors also held the OR presidency. Ray Cuninghame-Green was Professor of Industrial Mathematics at the University of Birmingham from 1975–1999, where he laid the foundations of management mathematics. He was a pioneer of max- algebra, and it is fitting that one of the ‘35-year collection’ is on this topic and co-authored by Peter Butkovic, who collaborated with Ray for many years (Butkovic and Aminu, 2009). Lyn Thomas was appointed as editor in 1988, and the journal changed its name to the IMA Journal of Mathematics Applied in Business and Industry in the same year. Lyn was Professor at the University of Edinburgh (later in Southampton) and served until 1996. Credit scoring was an important, developing topic during this time, and Lyn made many significant contributions. We pick one of these for the collection, wherein Crook, Thomas and Hamilton (1992) model default prediction under varying economic conditions. The Southampton connection was maintained when Sean McKee replaced Roy Stainton in 1992. Russell Cheng replaced Lyn in 1996 and served the journal until 2001 (see Appendix 1). During the 1970s, Lyn was a member of the OR group at the University of Manchester headed by Doug White. Indirectly then, Doug had an influence on the journal, not least because a later editor, Tony Christer, spent formative years in the same group. It is fitting therefore to include White (1989), which looks at heuristic programming, heuristics in today’s language, in the collection. Tony was appointed as Editor in 2001 and changed the journal’s title to IMA Journal of Management Mathematics, with which the journal persists to this day. Tony published many of his own papers in the journal on maintenance modelling. This remains an important topic for the journal. We select one of these © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. All rights reserved. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/imaman/article-abstract/31/1/1/5679976 by guest on 24 July 2020