May 16, 2007
The JSTOR database is an archive of important scholarly journals, offering researchers high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages. It now includes 37,094 articles from The American Mathematical Monthly, from 1894 to 2003. The 1962 article "College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage" by David Gale and Lloyd Shapley ranks as the most frequently accessed Monthly article in the database.
"College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage"
D. Gale and L.S. Shapley
The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 69, No. 1 (January, 1962), pp. 9-15
Gale and Shapley describe a procedure for assigning applicants to colleges that takes into account their ranked preferences and would be satisfactory for both applicants and colleges. In the special case in which the number of colleges equals the number of applicants, the result is a stable matching—one in which no element of the first matched set prefers an element of the second matched set that also prefers the first element. The Gale-Shapley algorithm for producing such optimal pairings is now often expressed in terms of matching men and women to create stable marriages.
Access to the JSTOR archive is provided by many college, university, and other libraries. To find out if your library is a JSTOR participant, use one of the following links:
United States: http://www.jstor.org/about/participants_na.html.
Other Countries: http://www.jstor.org/about/participants_intl.html.
If your library is not on one of the above lists, look for a nearby library that does have JSTOR access and is open to the public. Members of the MAA have the option of purchasing an individual subscription to JSTOR that gives them access to the archives of The American Mathematical Monthly, Mathematics Magazine, and The College Mathematics Journal.