LINEAR ALGEBRA AND ITS APPLICATIONS
          
                          Special issue on 

             Determinants and the Legacy of Sir Thomas Muir
 

Thomas Muir was born in 1844  in Scotland, was educated at the University
of Glasgow, and died in 1934 in South Africa. His monumental work "The
Theory of Determinants in the Historical Order of Development" in 5
volumes  was published from 1890 (volume 1) to 1930 (volume 5). It covers
the history of determinants from its foundation by Leibniz (1693) and
Cayley (1841) to 1920. A sixth volume was being prepared when Muir died
in 1934.

Determinants arise not only in linear algebra but in many other parts of
mathematics and science, such as combinatorial enumeration, graph theory,
representation theory, symmetric functions, statistics, number theory,
interpolation and approximation, tilings, special function theory,
statistical mechanics, and theoretical computer science. Entries of the
associated matrices can vary from just 0's and 1's (or 0's, 1's and -1's)
to multivariable polynomials to special functions to general functions.
Matrices whose determinants are to be evaluated can be unstructured or
highly structured (e.g. Laplace, Vandermonde, Hankel, Fredholm, Toeplitz).

For this special issue, we seek papers that, to name a few possibilities,
advance the theory of determinants, provide special formulas for
determinants, use determinants crucially in the context of solving a problem
in another field, and give new application of determinants.

In editing this special issue we seek to honor the legacy of Muir as well
as to showcase the central role of determinants in mathematics.

All papers submitted must meet the publication standards of Linear
Algebra and its Applications and will be refereed in the usual way. They
should be submitted to one of the special editors of this issue listed
below by November 30, 2003.

Wayne Barrett                           Samad Hedayat
Department of Mathematics               Department of Mathematics,
Brigham Young University                Statistics & Computer Science
Provo, UT 84602, USA                    322 SEO, 851 S. Morgan St.
wayne@math.byu.edu                      University of Illinois at Chicago
                                        Chicago, IL 60607-7045, USA
                                        hedayat@uic.edu


Christian Krattenthaler                 Raphael Loewy   
Institut Girard Desargues               Department of Mathematics
Université Claude Bernard Lyon-I        Technion - I.I.T.
Bâtiment Braconnier                     Haifa 32000, ISRAEL
21 Avenue Claude Bernard                loewy@techunix.technion.ac.il  
F-69622 Villeurbanne Cedex, FRANCE
kratt@euler.univ-lyon1.fr




Editor-in-chief responsible for this issue:
Richard A. Brualdi
Department of Mathematics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
480 Lincoln Drive
Madison, WI  53706, USA
brualdi@math.wisc.edu