The journal's mission statement describes its scope as follows: "Experimental Mathematics publishes original papers featuring formal results inspired by experimentation, conjectures suggested by experiments, and data supporting significant hypotheses.

Experimental Mathematics was established in 1992 by David Epstein, Silvio Levy, and Klaus Peters.

[5][6] In a 1995 article in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, in part responding to such criticism, Epstein and Levy described the journal's aims as follows:[7] But the main difference reflects the philosophy above: we are interested not only in theorems and proofs but also in the way in which they have been or can be reached.

Note that we do value proofs: experimentally inspired results that can be proved are more desirable than conjectural ones.

However, we do publish significant conjectures or explorations in the hope of inspiring other, perhaps better-equipped researchers to carry on the investigation.