It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text and perhaps especially the quality of its specially-commissioned color graphics.
Einstein is among the many famous scientists who have contributed articles in the past 150 years.
In the years that followed World War Two, the magazine's readership was in steep decline. In 1948, three partners who were planning on starting a new popular science magazine, to be called The Sciences, instead purchased the assets of the old Scientific American and put its name on the designs they had created for their new magazine. Thus the partners and publisher Gerard Piel, editor Dennis Flanagan, and general manager Donald H. Miller, Jr. created essentially a new magazine. Miller retired in 1979, Flanagan and Piel in 1984, when Gerard Piel's son Jonathan became president and editor; circulation had grown fifteenfold since 1948. In 1986 Scientific American was sold to the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group of Germany, who have owned it since.
In the fall of 2008, Scientific American was put under the control of Nature Publishing Group, a division of Holtzbrinck. Donald H. Miller died in December, 1998, Gerard Piel in September 2004 and Dennis Flanagan in January 2005. Mariette DiChristina is the current editor-in-chief, after editor John Rennie stepped down in June of 2009
