JSTOR All-Stars: "Mathematics and Sex"

September 12, 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 provocatively titled 1976 article "Mathematics and Sex" by John Ernest ranks as the seventh most frequently accessed Monthly article in the database.

"Mathematics and Sex"
John Ernest
The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 83, No. 8 (October 1976), pp. 595-614

"Our title might well evoke a smile. To a rationally minded person it would be hard to imagine two different subjects that are less related. Yet it is one of those irrational features of our cultural and social structure that a person's sex is, and has been, very relevant to that individual's opportunities in the world of mathematics."

The top six Monthly articles are:

  1. "College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage" by David Gale and Lloyd Shapley, Vol. 69, No. 1 (January, 1962), pp. 9-15.
  2. "Introduction to Fermat's Last Theorem" by David A. Cox, Vol. 101, No. 1 (January, 1994), pp. 3-14.
  3. "Period Three Implies Chaos" by Tien-Yien Li and James A Yorke, Vol. 82, No. 10 (December, 1975), pp. 985-992.
  4. "History of Mathematics Before the Seventeenth Century" by Raymond Clare Archibald, Vol. 56, No. 1 (January, 1949), pp. 7-34.
  5. "Galois Theory for Beginners" by John Stillwell, Vol. 101, No. 1 (January, 1994), pp. 22-27.
  6. "Can One Hear the Shape of a Drum?" by Mark Kac, Vol. 73, No. 4 (April 1966), pp. 1-23.

New Features at the JSTOR Archive.

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.