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I was reading the monthly column “Tony Phillips’ Take on Math in the Media, A monthly survey of math news” which can be found on the AMS web site at: http://www.ams.org/mathmedia/

In his commentary on “Curvature and the growth of cells”, he states that a math paper in Nature is relatively rare. That got me pondering. Could I identify “math” papers in publications not typically math? And is it so rare?

My first experiment in the Web of Science was to search on topic = mathematics and source = nature or science and year of publication = 2006. This search yielded 7 hits. 2 for Nature and 5 for Science.

My next experiment was to search on topic = mathematics and year of publication = 2006. This search yielded 1182, but of course included math journals. To try to eliminate the math journals, I selected Subject Categories under “Refine your results”, where you have the option to deselect subject categories. I then deselected any subject category with the mathematics or computer science (I know it could be argued not necessarily math).

The top twenty subject categories are below with the number of papers in ():
EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH (155)
PSYCHOLOGY, EDUCATIONAL (64)
PHILOSOPHY (43)
HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (38)
PSYCHOLOGY, DEVELOPMENTAL (37)
EDUCATION, SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINES (31)
ENGINEERING, ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC (30)
PSYCHOLOGY, MULTIDISCIPLINARY (30)
MULTIDISCIPLINARY SCIENCES (29)
PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL (29)
ENGINEERING, ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC (26)
EDUCATION, SPECIAL (23)
PHYSICS, MULTIDISCIPLINARY (22)
REHABILITATION (22)
NEUROSCIENCES (15)
ENGINEERING, MULTIDISCIPLINARY (12)
ETHICS (12)
HISTORY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (12)
PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIAL (12)
ECONOMICS (11)

Which only goes to show that math papers can appear in virtually any journal of any discipline. Mathematicians have always known this. Perhaps not the most rigorous research, but it was fun to check it out.