Submissions

Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • I have read the Submission Information below and identify as an undergraduate student (or one who has recently graduated) who has completed an original expository article completed while I was an undergraduate student.
  • I have read and attached the Author Agreement to my application. The author(s) agree to the terms of this Author Agreement, which will apply to this submission if and when it is published by this journal.
  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  • Where available, stable URLs for the references have been provided.
  • The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.

Submission Instructions

CJUM Expository Journal

The CJUM Expository Journal is our main issue our expository articles following the general guidelines detailed above. All articles, excluding senior theses written by Columbia students, should be submitted here (including if your article was part of a senior thesis written at another institution).

Please submit your article to the Columbia Journal of Undergraduate Mathematics Expository Journal for the 2024-25 edition here: https://forms.gle/4gKfqpZe9YHWTdpi9. We will be accepting submissions for the 2024-2025 issue until December 8th, 2024 at 11:55 p.m Eastern Standard Time. 

Columbia Senior Thesis Issue

Starting 2024, we will be publishing another issue of the journal focused on Columbia senior theses. We are no longer accepting submissions for issue. Please check back next year!

You are certainly welcome, and encouraged, to edit your thesis to better fit the format of an expository journal, to better fit a defined audience, for increased clarity, or for any other reason before submission. 

 

General Guidelines

As an expository journal, we will not accept submissions that prove new results. Submissions should be expository, with their novelty stemming from how they present results, whether this is in terms of the submission’s target audience, approach to the material, or style. We generally expect submissions to originate from senior theses, REUs, and coursework, but are open to submissions written for any reason, so long as they were written while the author was an undergraduate or high school student. We wish to construe mathematics broadly, accepting articles in pure and applied mathematics, statistics, mathematical physics, mathematical finance, logic, theoretical computer science, etc. 

  • Length: We will largely accept submissions of lengths between 5-15 pages, but will also publish a small number of longer (15-30) page submissions each issue, especially if these submissions are the result of an undergraduate senior thesis. We encourage authors who wish to submit a longer piece to consider submitting an excerpt.
  • Undergraduate status: The work under review must have been conducted while the author was an undergraduate student or a high school student. Of course, we will allow edits and reformatting. For example, one could submit an undergraduate senior thesis one or two years after graduation, with possible small edits.
  • Target audience: The target readership of CJUM are undergraduates, broadly construed. Therefore, part of our review process includes readability and accessibility. We would like to target a large group of undergraduates, and are interested in submissions across the spectrum of readership, from younger students with only a background of calculus or linear algebra to experienced undergraduates covering upper-level graduate topics.
  • Artistic submissions: We are open to accepting artistic submissions and other submissions in a nontraditional format, but only those with an explicitly pedagogical goal. (Were Ravi Vakil an undergraduate, we would be delighted to publish his Exact Sequence Picture Book.)

As an example of what we would be interested in, consider a submission on the fundamental group. This topic is part of a standard upper-level undergraduate course, and we would not accept a submission which just re-presents content in the style of a textbook, no matter how clearly written the submission might be. However, we would be interested in any of the following:

  • A submission which introduces the fundamental group to students with only a calculus background while gesturing at the structure of the formal construction. (Novelty of audience)
  • A submission which defines the fundamental group and gives a clear, introductory computation of the fundamental group of the circle which eschews the usual machinery of covering spaces. (Novelty of approach)
  • A submission which defines the fundamental group with heavy use of diagrams, clearly illustrating all arguments in a way that exceeds a standard textbook. (Novelty of style)

The Columbia Journal of Undergraduate Mathematics publishes works written in English.

If you are unsure if your submission meets our criteria, you are welcome to contact us directly at columbiajournalofundergradmath@gmail.com.

All articles should be written in LaTeX, and submitted as a PDF file; if accepted, we will contact the author to access LaTeX code and any figures. All submissions should be in English. 

By submitting a manuscript, an author acknowledges that it is not being considered, nor will be submitted, for publication elsewhere. 

All submissions should be accompanied by an abstract. If the submission was produced in consultation with a faculty member, this faculty member should email a brief (1-2 paragraph) email to columbiajournalofundergradmath@gmail.com indicating their level of involvement and views on why the submission should be published before the submission deadline.

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