I wonder if anyone else has noticed that the market for expository papers in mathematics is very narrow (more so than it used to be, perhaps).
Are there any journals which publish expository work, especially at the "intermediate" level? By intermediate, I mean neither (i) aimed at an audience of students, especially undergraduate students (e.g. Mathematics Magazine) nor (ii) surveys of entire fields of mathematics and/or descriptions of spectacular new results written by veteran experts in the field (e.g. the Bulletin, the Notices).
Let me give some examples from my own writing, mostly just to fix ideas. (I am *not* trying to complain.)
1) About six years ago I submitted an expository paper "On the discrete geometry of Chicken McNuggets" to the American Mathematical Monthly. The point of the paper was to illustrate the utility of simple reasoning about lattices in Euclidean space to give a proof of Schur's Theorem on the number of representations of an integer by a linear form in positive integers. The paper was rejected; one reviewer said something like (I paraphrase) "I have the feeling that this would be a rather routine result for someone versed in the geometry of numbers." This shows that the paper was not being viewed as expository -- i.e., a work whose goal is the presentation of a known result in a way which will make it accessible and appealing to a broader audience. I shared the news with my officemate at the time, Dr. Gil Alon, and he found the topic interesting. Together we "researchized" the paper by working a little harder and proving some (apparently) new exact formulas for representation numbers. This new version was accepted by the Journal of Integer Sequences:
http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL8/Clark/clark80.html
This is not a sad story for me overall because I learned more about the problem ("The Diophantine Problem of Frobenius") in writing the second version with Gil. But still, something is lost: the first version was a fairly faithful writeup of a talk that I have given to advanced undergraduate / basic graduate audiences at several places. For a long time, this was my "general audience" talk, and *it worked* at getting people involved and interested: people always came up to me afterward with further questions and suggested improvements, much more so than any arithmetic geometry talk I have ever given. The main result in our JIS paper is unfortunately a little technical [not deep, not sophisticated; just technical: lots of gcd's and inverses modulo various things] to state, and although I have recommended to several students to read this paper, so far nothing has come of it.
2) A couple years ago I managed to reprove a theorem of Luther Claborn (every abelian group is isomorphic to the class group of some Dedekind domain) by using elliptic curves along the lines of a suggestion by Michael Rosen (who reproved the result in the countable case). I asked around and was advised to submit the paper to *L'Enseignement Mathematique*. In my writeup, I made the conscious decision to write the paper in an expository way: that is, I included a lot of background material and explained connections between the various results, even things which were not directly related to the theorem in question. The paper was accepted; but the referee made it clear that s/he would have preferred a more streamlined, research oriented approach. Thus *EM*, despite its name ("Mathematical Education"), seems to be primarily a research journal (which likes papers taking new looks at old or easily stated problems: it's certainly a good journal and I'm proud to be published in it), and I was able to smuggle in some exposition under the cover of a new research result.
3) I have an expository paper on factorization in integral domains:
http://math.uga.edu/~pete/factorization.pdf
It is not finished and not completely polished, but it has been circulating around the internet for about a year now. Again, this completely expository paper has attracted more attention than most of my research papers. Sometimes people talk about it as though it were a preprint or an actual paper, but it isn't: I do not know of any journal that would publish a 30 page paper giving an intermediate-level exposition of the theory of factorization in integral domains. Is there such a journal?
<b>Addendum</b>: Looking back at the factorization paper just now (the first time in some months), I found something which I think is relevant to the issue at hand: I compare (unfavorably!) my paper to similar expositions by the leading algebraists P. Samuel and P.M. Cohn. I think these two papers, published in 1968 and 1973, are both excellent examples of the sort of "intermediate exposition" I have in mind (closer to the high end of the range, but still intermediate: one of the main results Samuel discusses, Nagata's Theorem, was published in 1957 so was not exactly hot off the presses when Samuel wrote his article). Both articles were published by the *American Mathematical Monthly*! I don't think the Monthly would publish either of them nowadays.
<b>Addendum #2</b>: By coincidence (truly; I had no plans to do so when I asked this question) I have recently submitted a paper to the Monthly:
http://math.uga.edu/~pete/coveringnumbersv2.pdf
(By another coincidence, this paper is a mildly souped up answer to MO question #26. But I did the "research" on this paper in the pre-MO days of 2008.)
Looking at this paper helps me to see that the line between research and exposition can be blurry. I think it is primarily an expository paper -- in that the emphasis is on the presentation of the results rather than the results themselves -- but I didn't have the guts to submit it anywhere without claiming some small research novelty: "The computation of the irredundant linear covering number appears to be new." I'll let you know what happens to it.
As far as comments on the paper are concerned: they are most welcome, but I ask that you send them to me privately unless you feel that they have some bearing on the general discussion at hand (which is perhaps unlikely).