Fifty years of The Journal of Combinatorial Theory

The idea of a specialist journal focused on combinatorics was first conceived in the early 1960s by Frank Harary and Gian-Carlo Rota, and successfully brought to fruition a few years later with the publication of the first issue, in 1966, of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory. Many eminent mathematicians contributed to this issue, including Paul Erdős, Ron Graham, Daniel Kleitman, and Marcel-Paul Schützenberger. These formative years, as well as the split of the journal into a Series A and B, is described wonderfully in an article commemorating Rota, published in JCTA in 2000 and written by Edwin Beschler, an editor at Academic Press at the time the journal was founded [2]. We will continue the story by highlighting some of the developments of JCTA during the time we were involved in the journal, both as Managing Editors and Editors-in-Chief. This roughly covers the period 1969–2015. When Bruce Rothschild was at MIT as a post-doc, Theodore Motzkin was passing through Cambridge, Massachusetts, on his way back to UCLA. He met with Gian-Carlo Rota who told him about the pending reorganization of JCT into JCTA and JCTB. As one of the original editorial board members of JCT, Rota asked Motzkin if he would consider becoming the Editor-in-Chief of Series A. Motzkin said he would think about it. As Rota told it, after a short pause, Motzkin said “yes”! Much later, Motzkin explained that he did a quick ‘calculation’, figuring that since Bruce Rothschild was soon to be joining UCLA, and Basil Gordon was already there, he could ask both to serve as Managing Editors. Gordon had previously worked with the Pacific Journal of Mathematics, which was edited at UCLA, and Motzkin knew he was an extraordinary scholar, very broad in his mathematical knowledge and interests, and extremely quick. He also knew he would be willing to take on this task, and so it transpired that in 1969 the new journal JCTA was effectively run from UCLA with Motzkin as Editor-in-Chief and Basil Gordon and Bruce Rothschild as Managing Editors. 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