Revue d’Histoire des Mathematiques

About Revue d’Histoire des Mathematiques

Revue d'Histoire des Mathématiques — Journal Profile

Revue d'Histoire des Mathématiques (in English, the Journal of the History of Mathematics) is France's specialist scholarly journal for the history of mathematics, published in Paris by the Société Mathématique de France (SMF), the country's national mathematical society. It was founded in 1995 and appears twice a year, publishing research in French and in English on how mathematics has been made, taught, circulated and understood across cultures and centuries. Its print ISSN is 1262-022X and its electronic ISSN is 1777-568X; the print ISSN is the linking ISSN recorded by OpenAlex for the title. Articles carry DOIs in the 10.24033/rhm series, the prefix the SMF uses for this journal, and each volume is numbered by calendar year — volume 28 appeared in 2022, volume 30 in 2024 and volume 31 in 2025, a sequence that runs unbroken back to its mid-1990s foundation.

Readers meeting this journal for the first time should understand what kind of history it publishes. This is not a magazine of mathematical curiosities and it is not a research journal in mathematics itself. It is a journal of historical scholarship about mathematics, written largely by mathematicians and historians working together, in which a theorem, a text, a correspondence network or a teaching tradition is studied as a historical object: dated, sourced, placed in its institutions and read against the evidence that survives. Its papers print the full apparatus of that craft — received, revised and accepted dates, abstracts in French and English, keywords in both languages, and Mathematics Subject Classification codes in the 01A family that the reviewing services reserve for history and biography of mathematics.

Identity and Bibliographic Record

The journal's full title is Revue d'Histoire des Mathématiques, standardly abbreviated Rev. Hist. Math. Its country of publication is France and its publisher of record is the Société Mathématique de France, whose address is associated with the Institut Henri Poincaré quarter of Paris, at 11 rue Pierre et Marie Curie, 75231 Paris. The two ISSNs divide by medium in the usual way: 1262-022X for the printed journal and 1777-568X for the electronic edition, and both are carried on the Journals World record for this post. OpenAlex resolves both ISSNs to a single source record (S2477019914) under the display name "Revue d histoire des mathématiques", with the linking ISSN 1262-022X, which confirms that the print and electronic editions are one journal and not two. The journal's Wikidata identifier is Q13416949. Its homepage, as recorded by OpenAlex, sits within the SMF's publications site, and its article PDFs are served from the society's own emath.fr domain under the Société Mathématique de France copyright line.

One caution belongs in any profile of this title, because bibliographic databases have historically confused it with neighbours. A history-of-mathematics journal is defined by its ISSN pair and its publisher, not by the words in its title: Italy's Bollettino di Storia delle Scienze Matematiche and the international journal Historia Mathematica work the same field from different societies, languages and editorial traditions, and neither is an edition of this one. The record profiled here is the French SMF journal, with the ISSN pair 1262-022X and 1777-568X, and every figure in this profile belongs to that record alone.

History and Foundation

The Revue d'Histoire des Mathématiques was founded in 1995, a fact recorded in the Société Mathématique de France's own accounts of its publishing programme: an institutional history of the society's publications, published in the Bulletin of the Irish Mathematical Society in 2006, lists the Revue among the SMF's journal and book series and states plainly that it "was founded in 1995". The foundation filled a deliberate gap. France had a long and distinguished tradition in the history of mathematics — the Séminaire d'Histoire des Mathématiques at the Institut Henri Poincaré had been running since 1948 — but no national journal devoted to the field, at a moment when the discipline was professionalising internationally alongside journals such as Historia Mathematica (founded in the 1970s) and the Archive for History of Exact Sciences. The SMF, founded in 1872 and today a non-profit association recognised as being of public utility, with more than 1,800 members, added the Revue to a publishing stable that already included its Bulletin (published since 1873), the Annales scientifiques de l'École normale supérieure distribution, Astérisque, and its book series.

The journal's trajectory since 1995 can be read in its own volumes. It settled into a rhythm of two issues a year forming one annual volume, a pattern ranking compilations also record as a frequency of two issues per year. Its articles grew longer and more heavily documented over time — recent issues carry studies of a hundred pages and more, editions of correspondence, and dossiers that print primary texts alongside commentary. The journal also developed a named section, Textes & Documents, for publishing source material with scholarly apparatus: a 2011 instalment, for example, printed letters by Edmund Landau and Edwin Bidwell Wilson documenting opposition to the boycott of German mathematics in the early 1920s, with an introduction setting the documents in context. French national research structures have supported the field around the journal, including the CNRS research grouping GDR 3398 for the history of mathematics established in 2011, which Canadian scholarly-society reporting notes helps support both the journal and the Numdam digital library. The SMF's digitisation effort, under its agreement with the NUMDAM programme run by the Cellule MathDoc, has made the society's back catalogue, this journal included in the society's digitised corpus, part of France's open mathematical heritage infrastructure, while current issues continue to appear in print and electronic form under subscription.

The Publisher: Société Mathématique de France

The Société Mathématique de France is one of the world's older national mathematical societies. It was created in 1872, in the reconstruction that followed the Franco-Prussian War, with the aim of promoting mathematics and research in mathematics, and it remains a non-profit association under French law, recognised as being of public utility, gathering teachers, researchers, students, doctoral candidates, engineers and other members of the mathematical community. From its Paris base it organises conferences, congresses, working groups and public-engagement activity, co-supervises with the CNRS and Aix-Marseille University the Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques (CIRM) at Luminy — the largest mathematics conference centre of its kind — and runs a substantial publishing house whose diffusion operation ships its journals and books to subscribers worldwide.

For an author, the identity of the publisher matters practically. The Revue is a society journal in the strict sense: it exists because the French mathematical community decided its history deserved a journal of record, it is edited within that community, its copyright line reads "© Société Mathématique de France", and its commercial model is the society subscription model rather than the article-charge model of commercial open-access publishing. Its bilingual practice — French and English side by side, with every article carrying abstracts and keywords in both languages — reflects the society's position between a strong national tradition of publishing mathematics in French and an international readership for the history of mathematics that works largely in English.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's scope is the history of mathematics in all periods, cultures and settings, studied with the methods of professional history. Its published contents show the breadth concretely. A 2022 article re-examined the contrasting aims and approaches in the study of ancient Egyptian mathematics in the 1920s, following how Thomas Eric Peet and Otto Neugebauer re-made a field that had centred on the Rhind papyrus. A 2024 article presented a commented edition of August Gutzmer's correspondence to the Portuguese mathematician Francisco Gomes Teixeira, using one man's letter archive to map a European network. A 2025 article traced Euclid's Elements in Latin from 1482 to 1703, classifying the vocabulary of more than a hundred early editions. A 2024 study of Charles Hermite's practices addressed the problem of the unity of mathematics itself. Ancient, medieval, early-modern and modern mathematics all appear; so do the history of mathematical institutions, of journals and publishing, of teaching, and of the relations between mathematics and its neighbouring sciences.

In OpenAlex's topic classification, the journal's dominant topic is "History and Theory of Mathematics", accounting for the large majority of its classified works, which matches the self-understanding visible in its pages. Its articles are classified by their authors under the 01A Mathematics Subject Classification headings — history of mathematics and mathematicians, including the history of particular periods, regions, schools and individuals — as the classification lines printed on its papers (01A40, 01A45, 01A55, 01A70, 01A90 and similar) attest. A manuscript belongs here when its contribution is historical understanding of mathematics: a new reading of a source, a documented reconstruction of a practice, an edition of a text, a prosopography, or an argument about how mathematical knowledge moved. A manuscript that merely uses old results, or proves new mathematics, belongs in a mathematics research journal instead, however historical its introduction may be.

What the Journal Publishes

The core of each issue is the research article: a substantial, fully referenced historical study, frequently long by the standards of mathematics journals, with primary-source quotation, archival citation and a bibliography that mixes primary texts with the secondary literature in several languages. Alongside research articles stands the Textes & Documents section, devoted to printing source material — correspondence, manuscripts, institutional records — with the editorial introduction and annotation that make it usable by other scholars; this section is one of the journal's distinguishing services to its field, because it turns archives into shared infrastructure. Book reviewing and the critical discussion of editions form part of the journal's wider service to the discipline, as they do across the history-of-mathematics journal family. Issues appear twice a year, and the two issues together form the annual volume whose pagination runs across the year, as the volume-and-page patterns of its recent volumes (for example volume 31, 2025, pages 69–106 for a single long study) illustrate.

Production conventions are visible in every published paper and are worth a submitting author's attention. Each article states the date the text was received, the date a revised version was received, and the date of acceptance — a transparency about the review timeline that is printed on the article itself, as on the 2025 Euclid study (received 7 February 2024, revised 19 July 2024, accepted 8 November 2024). Each carries a résumé in French and an abstract in English, keywords in both languages, a 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification line, and the author's institutional address and email. References follow the field's documentary habits, citing editions and archives precisely enough for another scholar to find the same page of the same copy.

Editorial Process and Peer Review

The journal is peer-reviewed: manuscripts are assessed by specialists before acceptance, and the received–revised–accepted dates printed on its articles document a genuine revision cycle rather than acceptance as submitted. The example timelines in recent volumes run from several months to the better part of a year between first receipt and acceptance, which is normal for a twice-yearly journal in a small, expert field where suitable referees are few and papers are long. The names of the journal's current editor-in-chief and editorial board are maintained on the society's journal pages; a definitive current list could not be verified from the official sources fetched for this profile, and authors should take the board and the submission route from the SMF's own journal page at the time they submit rather than from any secondary listing, this profile included. What can be said from the journal's own record is that its editorship has historically been drawn from France's senior historians of mathematics, that its referee pool is the international community of the field, and that its standards are those of historical scholarship: claims tied to sources, editions checked against originals, and argument answerable to the documentary record.

Metrics and Standing

OpenAlex, resolving the journal by its ISSN at the time of checking for this profile, records 258 works for the Revue d'Histoire des Mathématiques, cited 941 times in total, with a source h-index of 16, an i10-index of 25, and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.18. OpenAlex dates its first covered publication year to 1993 and its last to 2025, and records 97 of its works as openly accessible in some form. These figures describe a small, deep journal: two issues a year of long papers cannot accumulate the work counts of a weekly science title, and citation in the history of mathematics is slow, because the literature is used for decades rather than seasons. The h-index of 16 on 258 works — roughly one work in sixteen cited sixteen times or more — is a respectable density for a humanities-leaning field, and the journal's papers continue to be cited in the international literature of the discipline, as the citation record of its recent volumes shows.

Scopus-based measures tell a related story. The Journals World record from which this profile was built carried the journal as a fourth-quartile title with an h-index of 10 on the Scopus-derived data then in use, and ranking compilations record Scopus coverage running from 2005 to 2021 and resuming in 2023–2024, with coverage described as discontinued in Scopus thereafter. Authors should therefore check the journal's current Scopus status directly with the database or the publisher before relying on it for an institutional requirement, because coverage of small society journals changes and secondary compilations lag behind. The journal's standing in its own field does not rest on these quartiles: within the history of mathematics it is one of a handful of journals of record worldwide, the French-language anchor of the discipline, and a venue whose papers are read by essentially the whole research community in its area — a form of standing that quartile tables, built for large citation markets, measure badly. Clarivate's Journal Impact Factor for this title is not published in the sources consulted for this profile, and no impact factor is claimed for it here.

Indexing, Archiving and Access

The journal's papers are written to the conventions of the mathematics reviewing ecosystem — Mathematics Subject Classification codes, structured abstracts, complete references — and its contents are tracked by the bibliographic services of mathematics and of the history of science, as well as by Scopus during its coverage years described above. Its digital preservation sits within the SMF's own arrangements and the French mathematical digitisation infrastructure: the society's agreement with the NUMDAM programme, the national digitisation programme for mathematical documents led by the Cellule MathDoc, covers the society's corpus, and the journal's articles are distributed as PDFs from the SMF's own site with stable DOIs in the 10.24033/rhm series, so a citation resolves to the publisher's copy. OpenAlex does not flag this journal as listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, and a DOAJ listing could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile; the journal is best described as a subscription society journal, in which some individual works are openly accessible (OpenAlex counts 97 such works) through author and archival copies, while the edition of record is sold by subscription in print and electronic form.

Fees and Open Access Policy

No article processing charge for this journal is published in the sources consulted for this profile, and OpenAlex records no APC prices for the title. That pattern is consistent with the society-subscription model: the costs of publication are carried by subscriptions, society membership and institutional sales rather than by a per-article fee levied on authors. Any page or colour charges, and the society's current policy on authors posting their accepted manuscripts, are matters on which a specific figure could not be verified here and should be confirmed with the SMF at submission time. Authors whose funders require a particular open-access route should raise it with the editorial office before submitting, since a small society journal's options may differ from those of a large commercial publisher, and the journal's own office is the authoritative source.

How to Submit

Submissions are made through the journal's official channels as directed on the Société Mathématique de France's pages for the Revue — the society's journal homepage recorded for the title is its Publications/RevueHistoireMath page on the SMF site. Practical guidance drawn from the journal's own published papers: write in French or in English, since the journal publishes both and prints abstracts and keywords in both languages regardless of the language of the article; prepare the received/revised apparatus the journal expects, including a Mathematics Subject Classification line in the 01A range and full documentary references to editions and archives; expect a refereeing timeline measured in months, with revision, as the dates printed on recent articles show; and do not submit work under consideration elsewhere, in line with the ordinary ethics of scholarly journals. Because the journal appears only twice a year, a paper accepted after an issue has closed waits for the next, and authors planning around a thesis defence, a grant report or a tenure file should build that rhythm into their schedule. Enquiries about fit — for example, whether a long edition of documents suits the Textes & Documents section — are properly addressed to the editorial office through the society.

Similar Journals

Authors weighing venues in this field usually compare a small set of titles. Historia Mathematica, the Elsevier journal associated with the International Commission on the History of Mathematics, is the field's large international English-language venue, publishing historical scholarship on mathematics in all cultures and periods, with book reviews and abstracts of current literature. The Archive for History of Exact Sciences (Springer) leans toward the history of mathematics and the exact sciences read closely against their technical content. Italy's Bollettino di Storia delle Scienze Matematiche is the closest structural cousin — a national-language society tradition in the history of the mathematical sciences — and the British Journal for the History of Mathematics serves the British Society for the History of Mathematics community. The Revue d'Histoire des Mathématiques is the natural home among these for work that benefits from the French scholarly tradition in the field, for French-language publication with English apparatus, and for long documentary articles and source editions that its Textes & Documents section is built to carry.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Revue d'Histoire des Mathématiques? The print ISSN is 1262-022X and the electronic ISSN is 1777-568X. OpenAlex records 1262-022X as the linking ISSN for the single source record covering both editions.

Who publishes Revue d'Histoire des Mathématiques? The Société Mathématique de France (SMF), the French national mathematical society founded in 1872, publishes the journal from Paris. The "1924" that appeared as publisher in some database-derived listings is an error and forms part of the corrections noted with this profile.

When was the journal founded? In 1995, as recorded in the SMF's own account of its publishing programme.

How often does it appear? Twice a year; the two issues form one annual volume, numbered by year (volume 31 corresponds to 2025).

In which languages can I publish? The journal publishes in French and in English, and prints abstracts and keywords in both languages for its articles.

Is the journal peer-reviewed? Yes. Its articles print received, revised and accepted dates that document specialist review and revision before publication.

What are its citation metrics? At the time of checking, OpenAlex recorded 258 works, 941 citations, a source h-index of 16 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.18. Scopus-derived listings have placed it in the fourth quartile; its current Scopus coverage should be confirmed with the publisher, as compilations record coverage as discontinued after 2024.

Does it charge authors a fee? No article processing charge is published in the sources consulted; it operates on the society subscription model. Confirm any ancillary charges with the SMF when submitting.

Is it open access? It is a subscription journal. OpenAlex records 97 of its 258 works as openly accessible in some form, and the society participates in the NUMDAM digitisation programme for French mathematical literature, but the edition of record is subscription-based and a DOAJ listing could not be verified.

Where do I submit? Through the Revue's pages on the Société Mathématique de France website, following the instructions given there at the time of submission.