New Mathematical Library

The New Mathematical Library (NML) is a series of monographs on various mathematical topics. They are not textbooks, but are meant as supplements for the interested high school or early college student. The monographs are written by individual mathematicians, and at the NML's beginning, most of these had not written for the high school level prior to their work in the series. The first monographs appeared in 1961 and were originally published for the School Mathematics Study Group Monograph Project, a project begun in 1958 to remedy the perceived shortage of well-written mathematical materials for young people. Initially published by Random House and the L.W. Singer Company in conjunction with Yale University, the Mathematical Association of America took over publication in 1975. The NML was intended as a temporary project, set to come to an end after the publication of approximately thirty monographs or after commercial American publishers began to produce similar books for high schoolers. Instead, books are still being published under the NML as of 2003, though at a slower pace than during its height in the 1960s.

Anneli Lax, the NML's technical editor for almost forty years, was born Anneli Cahn on February 23, 1922 in Kattowitz, part of Germany at the time, but part of Poland soon after. Her family left Kattowitz for Berlin in 1929 to escape discrimination against Germans, but in 1933, to escape discrimination against Jews, moved to Paris, Palestine, and finally, in 1935, to the United States. She studied mathematics at Adelphi College, and following her graduation in 1942, she became an assistant researcher in New York University's aeronautics department and joined NYU's Courant Institute as a graduate student in 1943. Lax received her PhD in 1955 and was appointed to the faculty of the Department of Mathematics at NYU in 1961, where she stayed until her retirement in 1992. Dr. Lax accepted the position of technical editor of the New Mathematical Library series at its inception in 1958, and remained editor until her death in 1999. The series was renamed the Anneli Lax New Mathematical Library in her honor in the year 2000.