[FOM] 827: Tangible Incompleteness Restarted/1

[Timothy Y. Chow]

Larry Paulson wrote:
> A small anecdote from my time at Caltech, when I attended a course on 
> Combinatorial Mathematics taught by Herbert Ryser. As I recall, he 
> stated that the main outlet in his field was the Journal of 
> Combinatorial Theory. But at some point the editors came to feel that 
> "real" combinatorics (Latin squares, block designs, etc.) was being 
> pushed out by graph theory, so they divided the journal into Series A 
> and Series B. Any paper with even a hint of graph theory would be 
> banished to Series B. I can't confirm that he used that exact language, 
> but that's the impression I came away with.

The two papers I know in which the authors have said something in print 
about the JCTA/JCTB split are:

[1] Edwin F. Beschler, "Gian-Carlo Rota and the Founding of the Journal
     of Combinatorial Theory," J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 91 (2000), 2-4.

[2] Helene Barcelo, Bruce L. Rothschild, and S. Ole Warnaar, "Fifty years
     of The Journal of Combinatorial Theory," J. Combin. Theory Ser. A
     144 (2016), 1-6.

In [1], Beschler wrote, "However, no single journal or set of editors, 
prestigious and hard-working as they might be, could overcome the 
tremendous diversity in hopes and aspirations for combinatorics. 
Competition for page allocations and scheduling soon led to intolerable 
strains on the editorial board and there developed a real threat to 
continuing cooperation and growth."

In [2], the authors wrote, "The first thing that had to be done was to 
decide the fate of papers submitted to JCT, but which would only appear 
after the split into series A and B.  Together with the editors for JCTB, 
Bill Tutte and Dan Younger, it had to be decided which papers should be 
routed to JCTB and which to JCTA.  Typically papers on graph theory or 
matroids went to JCTB and the rest to JCTA.  This amounted to a rough 
split of about 40/60.  Naturally, papers often did not fit obviously into 
one series or the other and judgements had to be made.  This has remained 
a recurrent problem which we still fact to this day.  Over the years the 
distinction based on graphs and matroids has become much less pronounced 
as, with the emergence of new subfields such as additive combinatorics, 
combinatorial commutative algebra and physical combinatorics, the field of 
combinatorics has grown significantly."

Even to this day, JCTB states that it is "concerned primarily with graph 
theory and matroid theory."  So there's no doubt that the high volume of 
submissions had a lot to do with the split, and that JCTB was where almost 
all the graph theory papers went.

Whether there were perceptions that "graph theory was not really 
combinatorics" and whether such perceptions (if they existed) played a 
role in the split is harder to confirm.  I find it hard to believe that 
anyone involved in the split could have regarded Tutte's work in graph 
theory as being anything but first-rate.  And it's hard to split a journal 
without someone getting upset or offended somewhere along the line.  In 
the absence of concrete evidence to the contrary, I prefer to regard the 
split as being driven primarily by pragmatic considerations and not by 
snobbery.

Tim