This new series will publish expository commentaries celebrating key contributions (Milestones) to our scholarly heritage. A milestone should be widely acknowledged as a seminal paper that has aged into a classic. We believe that it takes time to cull the worthy, and we stipulate that any milestone presented in this series has to be at least 50 years old.

We do not seek surveys, because they are likely to be aplenty. A typical contribution will revisit the paper with modern eyes, highlighting its main insights and perhaps some (but definitely not all) contributions it has inspired. The key challenge is to make junior scholars appreciate its quality, elegance or novelty at the time when the paper has been published, possibly enticing them to read the original source. Special attention may be given to how the milestone suggested new problems to crack, or injected new techniques in the profession’s toolbox.

Friends, scholars, colleagues, lend me your ears;

I come not to bury a paper, but to praise it.

This apocryphal quotation encapsulates the spirit of the series. Mathematics is frequently argued to be timeless, because the formal validity of its theorems is forever. A milestone is timeless because of its elegance and beauty. Its language and style have aged well, keeping the paper as enjoyable to read as when it appeared. In this respect, extensive quotes from original sources are welcome.

We encourage prospective authors to submit proposals to the Series Editor with ample advance time. All contributions to the series undergo the same refereeing process as regular papers.