Re: [HM] Riemann's "dieses Journal"

Jeremy Gray (j.j.gray@open.ac.uk)
Sat, 12 Dec 1998 19:21:14 -0000

Dear All
On Collected Works: Editorial practises varied even in the 19th Century.
Weierstrass and his later editors simply corrected errors in the early
papers, without any sign that they had done so. Klein was much more
scrupulous. As for journals, as you know, while Crelle's journal was the
first specialist mathematical to be founded in the c19 and is still running,
there were others - many, in fact - that covered the sciences. These were
the learned society journals (of Berlin, Go/ettingen, Munich, Leipzig, ...)
and I can't right now recall when they began.
Best wishes
Jeremy

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From: Walter Felscher[SMTP:walter.felscher@uni-tuebingen.de]
Sent: 12 December 1998 16:23
To: David Wilkins; Avinoam Mann
Cc: historia-matematica@chasque.apc.org
Subject: [HM] Riemann's "dieses Journal"

1.

An author, writing in a journal "J" and referring to an earlier article
A (by himself or someone else) in that same journal "J", will often
mention the location of A as "this journal", followed by number of volume,
and possibly pages. This usage occurs still today when the references are
collected at the end of A ; it occurred much more so in former decades
when references were given in footnotes within the text.

An author writing in German will use "dieses Journal" or "diese
Zeitschrift" in the same manner.

Riemann's articles on Abelian functions appeared in Crelle's J., and so,
when referring to earlier articles which has appeared there, he wrote
"dieses Journal".

Weber, when editing Riemann's writings, published them in a separate book,
and so he found it appropriate not to refer to "this journal", but to name
the journal explicitly.

2.

The name of Crelle's Journal is, and has always been,

Journal fu"r die Reine und Angewandte Mathematik .

Some witty minds (particularly in times when most of its articles were
abstract algebra and number theory) jokingly spoke of it as the "Journal
fu"r Reine Unangewandte Mathematik". It was founded by August Leopold
Crelle (1780-1855) in 1826 .

The use of a founder's or an outstanding editor's name to denote a
jounal, such as

journal de Liouville = Journal des Mathe/matiques
giornale die Battaglini = Giornale die Matematiche
Crelle's Journal = J.Reine Angew.Math.

is not so much that of a nickname, but a means to distinguish a particular
publication from very similarly named other journals. Of course, it's
handed down from one generation to the next, even when after a hundred
years the person has become forgotten whose name once was given to it.

3.

In connection with collected works, it should be mentioned that, even
when edited by a famous colleague, they may not faithfully represent the
author's articles. A striking example are Georg Cantor's "Gesammelte
Abhandlungen", edited 1932 by Zermelo, in which there occur many words and
phrases e m p h a s i z e d (not by the use of italics but) by spaced
printing, while in Cantor's own articles no emphasis at all is indicated.

W.F.