Dear ICIAM colleagues and friends,
The year 2024 is progressing, colleagues in the northern hemisphere are enjoying summer holidays whereas the southern hemisphere is looking forward to spring. July/August is often a quiet period, also for ICIAM. Nevertheless, this issue of Dianoia contains many interesting articles, but also some sad news. On June 28, 2024, Rolf Jeltsch passed away in the age of 78. Rolf was president of ICIAM from 2007 till 2011. An obituary is contained in this issue of ‘’Dianoia’’, and a more extensive obituary will be published by the European Mathematical Society of which Rolf was the president from 1999 till 2002.
Good news as well: our secretary, Suzanne Shontz, was named the 2024 winner of the James Corones Award in Leadership, Community Building and Communication from the Krell Institute. The award will be presented later this year at the KU Lawrence campus; a short article can be found in this issue of Dianoia.
An important event was the ICIAM Board meeting on June 17, which was held online as decided in last year’s Board meeting: from now on, Board meetings in even years will be held online. The online character put quite some pressure on the agenda and the timing, and also implied that long discussions were not possible. The latter means that important discussions had to be postponed till next year’s Board meeting, which will be an in-person event in Hanoi, Vietnam (as has been decided by voting) on September 13, 2025, preceded as usual by a workshop on September 11-12. The online meeting was very well attended, and one of the major results of the meeting was the election of two new officers-at-large: we welcome José Carillo (Oxford) and Weizhu Bao (Singapore), completing the step towards six officers-at-large, besides the president, past president, secretary and treasurer. It means a considerable additional workforce to carry out tasks for the benefit of ICIAM, its member societies and for industrial and applied mathematics in general.
Another important item in the Board meeting was the presentation of the pre-bids for the ICIAM 2031 Congress. It was decided that all three pre-bids were excellent, and will advance to the next round, the site visits by the officers. In next year’s in-person Board meeting, it will be decided which of the three pre-bids will be invited to organize the 2031 Congress: Busan (Korea), Boston (USA) or Brisbane (Australia)….by sheer coincidence all starting with the letter B!
There are quite some conferences and workshops organised by our member societies, and it would be great if your society can inform us about such workshops that we can then place on our website. Showing activity in the field of industrial and applied mathematics is extremely important, and the officers will definitely work on this visibility. One conference I would like to mention here is the conference on industrial and applied mathematics that will be held in Cape Town, September 30 till October 5. The organisers are very busy organising this event, and are planning to officially launch an African organisation for industrial and applied mathematics during this event. Hence, I would like to ask all of you to consider attending this important event for African mathematics. More information can be found on the webpage https://aciam.co.
At the end of May, I attended the annual Abel prize ceremony in Oslo. This year’s winner, Michel Talagrand, received the Abel prize from crown prince Haakon of Norway, and many mathematicians were present to celebrate this very special occasion. You can read more on the official web page of the Abel prize, https://abelprize.no/. It is really great that the Norwegian Parliament (The Storting) has installed this ‘’Nobelprize for mathematics’’ in 2002, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Abel’s birth.
Together with the IMU, we are preparing a joint statement on citations farms, papermills, citation indices and related items. The reason for doing this is that the organisation Clarivate, which annually published a list of highly cited researchers (top 2%), has eliminated mathematicians in their 2023 list, and will probably do so also in the future, as there are strong suspicions of fraudulent behaviour. The statement will be published after the summer.
Finally, I would like to draw your attention to an important election that will take place during the next Board meeting in Hanoi, namely the election of the president-elect. Later this year we will announce how to nominate candidates, but in view of the importance of this position I hope you will all start thinking about suitable candidates from your societies.
I sincerely hope we can continue to count on your support in all of ICIAM’s activities. Don’t hesitate to share your opinions, ideas or suggestions with us. We can learn a lot from each other, and being together will make mathematics, especially in applications and industry, much stronger and more visible. This is our joint mission!
Wil Schilders, president