Special issue: 50th anniversary of the Wiener index (Q1377611)

The eight articles of this volume will be reviewed individually. This issue marks the 50th anniversary of the appearance of the paper 'Structural determination of paraffin boiling points' by Harold Wiener (1947), where he introduced the graph invariant that eventually became known as the Wiener index or Wiener number. The Wiener index is the first in a long series of so-called topological indices, numerical structure descriptors deduced from the molecular graph. Wiener introduced the index \(W\) as a measure of 'molecular branching'. Later Stiel and Todos, Hosoya, and finally Entringer, Jackson and Snyder (1976) studied this quantity in graph theory (graph distance, mean distance). This issue wants to emphasize the connections between graph theory and mathematical chemistry.