Cupid's Problem

Summary

For 25 years I had the enormous pleasure of serving as Editor of the Elementary Problems Department of The American Mathematical Monthly, succeeding Professor H. S. M. Coxeter of the University of Toronto when he retired from that position. One of the enjoyable features of the position lay in the resulting interesting correspondence with a large number of both domestic and foreign mathematicians. I got to know a great many of these mathematicians and the work that currently engaged them. But in time, with the huge growth of the membership of the MAA, it became essentially impossible for a single individual to handle the resulting burgeoning Problem Department correspondence. For a time I held on, with the valuable assistance of Professor Dodge. Finally, however, I found it wise to recommend that the department be handled by a group of mathematicians, the group containing a geometer, an algebraist, an expert on number theory, and so on, so that the proposals and solutions could be read and judged by an appropriate member of the group. The first group to undertake the task was located at the University of Maine, and it then passed on to a succession of similar groups located at other universities.

It was customary, of course, to acknowledge, with their locations, both the proposers and the solvers of the various problems, and to give a title to each problem when its solution appeared. Herein elements of mysticism occasionally arose.