Aims & Scope

The Nigerian Journal of Mathematics and Applications (NJMA, print ISSN 0795-2767) is a double-blind peer-reviewed, open-access journal published three times a year by the Mathematical Association of Nigeria (MAN). It publishes original research papers in all areas of mathematics and its applications. Papers that combine sound mathematical concepts with applications, and mathematics motivated by the prospect of potential application, receive higher recognition from the editors.

SUBJECT AREAS

• Numerical analysis and computational mathematics — linear multistep, block, hybrid block and continuous collocation methods; backward differentiation formulae; Obrechkoff, second- and third-derivative methods; Runge-Kutta, partitioned and phase-fitted methods for oscillatory Hamiltonian systems; integrators for stiff systems, singular initial value problems and Lane-Emden equations; boundary value problems and shooting methods; orthogonal polynomial and power-series basis functions; numerical integration and quadrature; finite difference, finite element and Galerkin schemes including Crank-Nicolson and Lax-Friedrichs; and the consistency, convergence, A-, L- and L0-stability and error analysis of such schemes.
• Differential and integral equations — ordinary and partial differential equations, parabolic, elliptic and hyperbolic problems; Volterra and Fredholm integral and integro-differential equations; fractional differential equations, including relaxation-oscillation problems and Mittag-Leffler methods; delay and stochastic delay differential equations; and semi-analytical treatments by variational iteration, Adomian decomposition, homotopy perturbation and homotopy analysis, differential transform, Picard and Taylor series, and Laplace, Aboodh and related integral transforms.
• Fluid dynamics, heat and mass transfer, and magnetohydrodynamics — boundary-layer flow over stretching, tilted and oscillating surfaces; nanofluids; second- and third-grade and other non-Newtonian fluids; flow through porous and Darcian media; MHD, Joule heating and mixed convection; thermal radiation, thermal diffusion and Soret and Dufour effects; chemical reaction and viscous dissipation; oscillatory and channel flow; Navier-Stokes and Boussinesq systems; seepage, groundwater and pipe-network flow; and combustion and premixed flames.
• Functional analysis, operator theory and inequalities — semigroups of linear operators, including C0-, analytic and contraction semigroups; bounded and unbounded operators, dual spaces, locally convex, bornological and uniformly local spaces; fixed point theory in metric, and Banach spaces, with contractive conditions, Mann iteration, common fixed points and weakly compatible mappings; and Hardy-, Opial-, Hadamard-, Jensen- and Gronwall-Bellman-type inequalities, including fractional and time-scale generalisations.
• Algebra, semigroup theory and discrete mathematics — finite and transformation semigroups, including order-preserving, order-reversing, order-decreasing and partial contraction mappings, and their cardinality, idempotency and combinatorial properties; symmetric, alternating and signed transformation semigroups; group theory, covering finite p-groups, nilpotent and abelian groups, conjugacy, maximal and invariant subgroups; fuzzy, interval-valued fuzzy and nilpotent fuzzy subgroups; soft sets, soft fields and soft multisets; and enumerative and combinatorial methods.
• Complex analysis and geometric function theory — analytic and univalent functions; starlike, convex, Bazilevic and bounded-turning subclasses; harmonic univalent functions; linear multiplier and fractional operators; convolution; coefficient bounds, Hankel determinants and the Fekete-Szego functional.
• Geometry and topology — differential geometry and complex manifolds; Grassmannians, Fano manifolds and Calabi-Yau structures; Tian invariants, plurisubharmonic functions and Monge-Ampere equations; pseudometric and general topology.
• Probability, stochastic analysis and statistics — stochastic differential equations and stochastic partial differential equations, including Cahn-Hilliard and stochastic wave equations driven by space-time white noise; Ito calculus, pth moment and almost-sure exponential stability; Markov chains; regression, logistic regression and linear mixed-effects models; maximum likelihood and restricted maximum likelihood estimation; time series, including Fourier regression, ARIMA, GARCH and heteroscedastic models; process capability and statistical quality control; acceptance sampling; overdispersion and mortality modelling; and sampling design, statistical power and test-based inference.
• Operations research, optimisation and control — linear and nonlinear programming; transportation, transshipment and assignment models; scheduling on identical parallel machines and just-in-time problems; interior penalty, barrier and other methods for constrained optimisation; game theory, including Stackelberg games and cooperative advertising models; supply chain problems; and optimal control, Pontryagin's maximum principle and Lagrange multiplier methods.
• Mathematical modelling and mathematical biology — deterministic and stochastic epidemic models, including hepatitis B, Ebola, human papillomavirus, malaria and SIR/SIRS systems, with reproduction numbers, equilibria, global stability and optimal control of transmission; population and ecological models, including predator-prey, competition, Lotka-Volterra and diffusive systems; environmental and pollutant transport models; agricultural, drawdown and water-resources models; and structural and mechanical vibration, including Euler-Bernoulli beams under moving loads.
• Mathematics in computing and information security — cryptography, including ElGamal, RSA, AES and hybrid schemes, and the finite-group structures behind them; coding and information theory; artificial neural networks applied to climatic, engineering and forecasting data; bioinformatics; network congestion control; and computational algorithms, heuristics and complexity.
• Mathematics education — teaching strategies and student achievement in secondary and tertiary mathematics; instructional design and curriculum reform; assessment, academic performance and progression at university level; and the contribution of mathematics to self-reliance and economic development.

METHODS: rigorous proof of new theorems, generalisations and counterexamples; derivation of numerical schemes together with their consistency, convergence, stability and error analysis, and numerical experiments compared against exact solutions or established methods; semi-analytical, perturbation and transform techniques applied to problems that resist closed-form solution; construction and qualitative analysis of mathematical models, including equilibria, stability, sensitivity and simulation; statistical analysis of real data with a stated design, population, sample and instrument; and comparative evaluation of a proposed method against the published alternatives it is meant to improve on.

MANUSCRIPT TYPES: original research articles of not more than 8,000 words; review articles of not more than 10,000 words; and short communications of not more than 3,000 words, in each case excluding references. Manuscripts must carry an abstract of not more than 250 words, three to six keywords, and a footnote giving the primary and secondary 2020 Mathematics Subject Classification of the paper. Equations are numbered by the section in which they appear, for example (3.11) in Section 3. References are listed alphabetically by author and cited in the text in author-date form, as Rauf et al. (2018). Manuscripts are submitted through the journal website as a Microsoft Word .docx file of not more than 10 MB with figures and tables embedded, prepared for double-blind review: author names, affiliations and correspondence addresses are entered on the submission form and must not appear in the manuscript file. TeX, LaTeX or AMS-LaTeX source is requested on acceptance. Submissions must be original, written in English, and neither published nor under consideration elsewhere.

READERSHIP: mathematicians, statisticians and computational scientists in universities and research institutes worldwide; researchers in applied, industrial and computational mathematics; engineers, physical scientists, epidemiologists and financial analysts who use mathematical methods; postgraduate students and their supervisors; mathematics educators, curriculum bodies and examination authorities; and the membership of the Mathematical Association of Nigeria.

OUT OF SCOPE: routine application of a standard method to a worked example, with no new theorem, no new scheme and no comparison against existing results; numerical methods presented without consistency, convergence or stability analysis, or tested only on problems the method reproduces trivially; re-derivation of published results without a new proof, generalisation or counterexample; models written down as a system of equations but never analysed for equilibria, stability or qualitative behaviour; statistical analyses that omit the design, population, sample size or instrument, or that report descriptive summaries only; simulation or software studies in engineering, physics, economics or computer science in which the mathematics is standard and incidental and no mathematical contribution is made; mathematics education papers with no described instrument, sample and analysis, and opinion pieces on the state of mathematics teaching; expository, lecture-note or textbook-style material and unrevised student project reports; and manuscripts whose results have already been published elsewhere, in any language.