With the current issue of MMOR, I am delighted to announce the start of the new section “OR for the Classroom” with the article Computing tight bounds via piecewise linear functions through the example of circle cutting problems by Steffen Rebennack.

As opposed to the submission type “Original Research”, papers in this new section are meant to be of a survey or, rather, tutorial type, treating advanced mathematical or computational aspects of operations research, and aiming at making such methodologies accessible for a wider audience.

While many tutorial papers are written in a style which makes them interesting only for experts in this or a closely related field, “OR for the Classroom” publications are meant for a more general audience. In fact, since Operations Research became such a wide field that it is hard to keep up even with basic developments in areas which are rather unrelated to one’s own research, “OR for the Classroom” aims at publishing short papers explaining such rather recent concepts to a wide OR audience. For this reason, publications in the category “OR for the Classroom” are written in a style tailored to the needs of students, preferably even undergraduates. On the other hand, the explained concepts should be so recent that they cannot be found in standard OR textbooks.

I expect that papers of this type not only promote new concepts from special fields to the whole OR community, but also to provide up-to-date contents for OR introductory lectures. Let me emphasize, however, that the focus of MMOR remains on the submission type “Original Research”, so that papers in the section “OR for the Classroom” appear only up to three times per year, and only upon invitation by the MMOR Editor-in-Chief. Proposals for such submissions to the EiC are welcome at any time.