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Home , George Dantzig, Samuel Karlin

Letters to the Editor

A First Course in Operations Wehrung refuted the general case promising manuscripts go to the full Research with an application of Kuratowski’s editorial board for a final decision. The lead March feature article about little-known Free Set Theorem. In ear- Wehrung’s paper was one of these, , on page 351, lists lier work he had applied it to measure and the board—consisting at the time early courses in Operation Research. theory and K-theory, reminiscent of of the undersigned—certainly recog- But in January–March 1956, I took the versatility of Cohen’s forcing nized the importance of his work. However we had to make some hard a course in OR at Caltech, given by counterexamples in logic. choices, even involving short papers . He told us on the first Judging from this rejection and like Wehrung’s. After considering day (January 4) that he thought it was the areas represented in recent JAMS the matter quite carefully, we finally probably the first-ever undergraduate volumes, the flagship journal of the decided not to accept the paper. course in OR. AMS would appear to specialize in We would caution against trying was one of some areas at the expense of others. Whereas fully a quarter of its papers to read too much into a single edito- the topics covered. since its 1988 inception have been rial decision. JAMS gets substantially It is peculiar that Karlin’s name in algebraic geometry and number more first-rate submissions than we never appears in the article—for one theory, some areas including lattice are able to accept, and we end up de- thing, he left Caltech for Stanford in theory aren’t even on JAMS’s radar. clining many top-notch papers (often 1956, ten years before Dantzig (and Yet JAMS’s masthead mission with glowing referee reports) in all Cottle) went to Stanford. I suppose statement, “This journal is devoted areas of . We appreciate that they knew one another, and I to research articles of the highest that there can be disagreement about wonder why Karlin was omitted. quality in all areas of pure and ap- the decisions involved in selecting

plied mathematics,” implies that it among outstanding manuscripts. —Martin C. Tangora is area-blind. JAMS could change the But we reaffirm that JAMS is com- University of Illinois at statement, but then what would the mitted to publishing highest-quality [email protected] AMS be without a journal in which research across the full spectrum of

the leading results in all areas can mathematics. (Received February 26, 2007) compete on a level playing field? —Ingrid Daubechies On behalf of the area of lattice Is JAMS Area-blind? theory, the undersigned therefore Ordinarily the solution to an impor- [email protected] petition the AMS to encourage JAMS tant long-open problem is an occa- to live up to its mission statement. —Robert Lazarsfeld sion for celebration. One of the most More information about the Con- famous problems in lattice theory is gruence Lattice Problem and its solu- [email protected] Dilworth’s half-century-old Congru- tion can be found at http://clp. ence Lattice Problem, whether the stanford.edu. —John Morgan congruence lattices of lattices are Columbia University exactly the distributive algebraic lat- —Brian Davey [email protected] tices. In January 2006 Friedrich Weh- La Trobe University rung submitted his 14-page solution [email protected] —Andrei Okounkov to the Journal of the AMS. At a recent meeting of the full board the editors Princeton University —Melvin Henriksen [email protected] acknowledged the referees’ highest Harvey Mudd College praise but rejected the paper for lack [email protected] —Terence Tao of “interaction with other areas of UCLA mathematics”. —Petar Markovic´ [email protected] Lattices arise naturally in many University of Novi Sad areas of mathematics and have been [email protected] widely applied in Correction and elsewhere. The congruence lat- —Vaughan Pratt In the feature article on Oswald tices of algebras are algebraic (Birk- Veblen (Notices, May 2007), lines 4, hoff-Frink 1948), and all algebraic [email protected] 5, and 6 on page 617, column one, lattices so arise (Grätzer-Schmidt should read “Over the summer the 1963). The congruence lattices of lat- (Received April 1, 2007) Carnegie Corporation and Rock- tices are furthermore distributive (Fu- efeller Foundation awarded grants nayama-Nakayama 1942); Dilworth of US$60,000 and US$12,000, re- showed in the 1940s that all finite Reply to Davey, Henriksen, spectively”, not “Rockefeller Foun- distributive lattices so arise, subse- Markovic´ and Pratt dation and Carnegie Corporation” quently extended by Huhn in 1985 to Submissions to JAMS are initially as printed. distributive algebraic lattices with 1​ handled by individual editors, and —Steve Batterson ℵ compact generators. only about 15 percent of the most

694 Notices of the AMS Volume 54, Number 6