Long-time readers of ICIAM Dianoia will recall that the newsletter started in January 2013 as a PDF document mailed to subscribers. Sean Bohun was the managing editor, and we worked hard to produce elegant covers and nicely formatted articles. We recruited a small editorial committee to generate articles and help with decisions. Choosing the cover illustration and selecting the precise depth of color so that we could print the table of contents on top of it was always a matter of intense discussion between Sean and myself. A reproduction of the original front cover is at the end of this article.
With the October 2024 issue, I will say goodbye to my role as editor-in-chief, as Dianoia welcomes a new editor and editorial team, who take over in January 2025. The new editor needs no introduction to many in the ICIAM community, as he served as Treasurer of ICIAM for almost a decade. I am delighted that he is taking charge of one of my favorite ICIAM activities; here is a little bit about him.
José Alberto Cuminato, also known as Poti, is a professor of numerical analysis at the Institute of Mathematical and Computing Sciences (ICMC) at the University of São Paulo (USP) in São Carlos, Brazil. He holds a degree in Mathematics from the Universidade Estadual Paulista (1977), a Master's degree in Mathematics from USP (1981), an M Sc in Numerical Analysis from Oxford University Computing Laboratory (1983), and a Ph D in Numerical Analysis also from Oxford University Computing Laboratory (1987). He was the director of ICMC-USP in the period 2006-2010, president of the Brazilian Society of Applied and Computational Mathematics for two terms, 2005-2007 and 2007-2009, Treasurer of ICIAM 2010-2019, Member of the Council of Brazilian Society of Mathematics, in the Biennium 2016-2018, foreign corresponding member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2012) (FRSE) and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (2014). The work area is in Mathematics, emphasizing Numerical Analysis, mainly on the following topics: Simulation of incompressible flows and flows with free surfaces, finite difference methods, numerical methods for ordinary and partial differential equations, Fredholm and Cauchy integral equations, and numerical linear algebra.
Poti and a team of journalists (who I will introduce in October) takes over a publication that, though informal, now has some history. The first six volumes, for the years 2013 through 2018, continued in PDF format, with Sean typesetting each issue, essentially by hand. In the lead-up to ICIAM Congresses we tried to feature the congress site on the covers. Our final PDF issue featured a street scene from Valencia, the site of the upcoming ICIAM 2019 Congress. The back cover of that issue is reproduced below.
Beginning in 2019, the format of Dianoia changed. By then ICIAM had retained the services of a part-time webmaster, Rob Carr, who designed the online interface that we use today. It has served us well. Every quarter, in January, April, July and October, subscribers receive an e-mail with what amounts to a table of contents. Clicking on the title of an article takes you to the full text.
More and more, Dianoia serves the ICIAM community in two ways. The essential purpose of the newsletter is to convey information about the operation of ICIAM to ICIAM's members. More accurately, since ICIAM's members are societies, the newsletter informs the members of ICIAM's member societies. Before Dianoia existed, people learned about what was happening from occasional e-mails sent by the President or Secretary, when they happened to remember to write something. Now there is a regular channel of communication.
Dianoia serves a second purpose as well: to feature articles that may not be directly about the workings of ICIAM or the events of the ICIAM Congresses, but that have impact on the world of industrial and applied mathematics. The International Science Council, of which ICIAM is a member, has become active in advancing science around the world, and in every issue there are reports of its activities. The Editorial Committee solicits articles on the activities of member societies, and on prizes and achievements related to our discipline. One of the reasons that the current Editorial Committee is so delighted to welcome Poti to the leadership of the newsletter is that it is time for new perspectives.
I am looking forward to seeing how Dianoia will evolve.
Below: The front cover of the first issue of Volume 1
Below: The back cover of the final issue of Volume 6.
