The idea of doing a sampling of the “best” in Mathematics Magazine over its 75-year history came to us when we found in Steven G. Krantz's book, Mathematical Apocrypha, the story of how it happened that the Stone-Weierstrass theorem, one of the great 20th century theorems in analysis, first appeared in an issue of Mathematics Magazine back in 1947/48. A fuller account of how this came about is described in the note accompanying Stone's article included in this volume.

Once we started looking at the contents of the Magazine we were surprised and pleased to find so much good material, much of it in the early days of the journal. The lineup of contributors of articles to the Magazine is star-studded: Maurice Fréchet, the eminent French analyst; Earle Raymond Hedrick, the first President of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA); Otto Neugebauer, the noted historian of mathematics and founder of Mathematical Reviews; E. T. Bell, author of Men of Mathematics; D. H. Lehmer, from a family of computational number theorists; H. S. M. Coxeter, largely responsible for the 20th century resurgence of geometry; Dirk Struik, the historian of mathematics; Olga Taussky, the eminent algebraist at Caltech; Ralph P. Boas, Jr., analyst, editor and president of the MAA; Paul Erdős, that peripatetic and fascinating problem solver; Don Knuth, the preeminent computer scientist; Richard W. Hamming, the pioneering expert in coding theory; Ron Graham, combinatorialist and number theorist, and president of both the American Mathematical Society and the MAA; and on and on.