Editorial.

Morony, Will ; Spencer, Toby

This is a special edition of The Australian Mathematics Teacher (AMT) to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers (AAMT) in 1966. We thank current Editor Maree Skillen for the opportunity to be guest editors.

While the AMT has a history that is older than the association itself (having been published originally by the Mathematical Association of New South Wales, one of the Foundation Members of AAMT), after AAMT's inception, AMT served a central role as the journal of the association (to be joined in later years by the Australian Senior Mathematics Journal and Australian Primary Mathematics Classroom). As such, the AMT is a wondrous repository of ideas, issues and opinions in mathematics education. It therefore seemed an appropriate celebration to republish a selection of those articles to be enjoyed from a modern perspective.

Any selection of articles such as this cannot claim to be totally representative of 50 years of the AAMT's flagship journal. With well over a thousand articles to choose from, making this selection was a fascinating--if daunting--task.

The archival collection of AAMT journals resides in the storeroom at the AAMT office in Adelaide. Without knowing what our selection criteria for articles would be, we began browsing back issues. As soon as we picked up a journal from 20, 30 or 40 years ago, there was a real temptation to get into the contents and relive some of the past concerns. Being sidetracked like this was very interesting, and sometimes amusing, but not necessarily all that productive.

Eventually, we were able to compile a 'long list' of articles. It might have been the title, the topic or the author that caught our eyes, but our main criterion was that the article should still have relevance for today's readers. As our selections were slowly reduced (but still managed to cover the boardroom table), we found that articles were starting to fall into various categories.

As we continued searching through the decades, the categories were reduced by finding more general threads that, for us, connected articles on different topics from different eras. In the end we settled on the three themes that follow:

* 'teachers and teaching'--differing takes on what it means to be a teacher of mathematics;

* 'big issues'--how school mathematics responds to 'big ticket' issues;

* 'thorny problems'--mathematical issues that have long challenged teachers.

Readers will find descriptions of these themes at the start of each section.

Of course, that wasn't the end of the story. With still over 80 articles, our next step was to whittle down the contents to fit into this 64-page bumper issue. In that process we sadly lost the opportunity to include examples of several long-running regular columns, such as Cactus, Diversions, The Making of Mathematics, and others.

With our articles selected, there were still a number of issues to deal with. Most of the articles were produced before there were means for saving reusable electronic files. It was tempting to scan and reproduce the articles exactly as they had originally been published, but that idea was rejected: the end product would not have met the expectations of its 2016 readership. The point is --as always with the AMT--for the content to be paramount.

Articles were scanned, and converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR) software so that they could be re-laid out using current software and journal styles. OCR certainly isn't perfect, so much of the mathematics and many of the diagrams were reproduced from scratch, along with careful checking of the text. AAMT's graphic designer Jacquie Sprott led the work to produce the journal through these processes, and to give it the 'look and feel' of the current AMT. We are indebted to Jacquie for her commitment to this task, often under extreme time pressure.

It was a great pleasure to spend time mining the archives. We would like to thank all past editors, regular contributors, and authors, who have contributed to the success of the AMT. We know that we could have generated a number of equally appropriate collections, but hope that you find this a worthwhile read and a fitting 50th anniversary edition.

Will Morony & Toby Spencer

Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers