We are pleased to launch a special series of interviews with former presidents of the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), offering reflections on the challenges and advances in applied mathematics over recent years. And we could not have chosen a more inspiring way to begin: our first guest is Barbara Keyfitz, who concluded her term as president exactly ten years ago and is the visionary behind Dianoia.
In this interview, Barbara revisits the behind-the-scenes work during her time at ICIAM, reflects on the future of applied mathematics, and shares her perspective on the impact of collaborative efforts in strengthening the field on a global scale.
Barbara, officially, ICIAM had its first president in 1999. However, since 1986, some members had already been organizing to ensure this international integration of Applied Mathematics could take place. What has been your journey with ICIAM? Tell us a little about how your involvement with the Council's work began.
As you may know, the first meeting organized by "CICIAM", which became ICIAM, took place in Paris in 1987. (Iain Duff wrote a concise history of the early days of this organization; see /start-iciam-congresses-iain-duff.) I have attended all the conferences/congresses except, as it happens, the 1991 Congress (the only one in the US), because they looked interesting, were in attractive places, and I found the atmosphere friendly and engaging. I may have given talks in minisymposia at some, but I first became an officer in 2003. At the Congress in Sydney, I was asked if I would become the treasurer, succeeding Bob O'Malley, who had been the treasurer since the positions of Secretary and Treasurer were first created in 1999. I'd been a Vice-President of SIAM (which has many vice-presidents), but my final term was ending. SIAM serves as the banker for ICIAM, and the other officers thought that since the bank and the currency were American, it would be best if the Treasurer were based there, too. For that matter, I'm also Canadian, and was about to take a temporary job in Canada, so it also seemed like good international relations. My term started in October, 2003. The other officers were Ian Sloan, who became president in 2003; past-president Olavi Nevanlinna, who had been president from 1999 to 2003, and Alain Damlamian, who served two terms as Secretary, from 1999 to 2007. Li Ta Tsien, who I knew by reputation since he has done some important work in my field, hyperbolic conservation laws, became the first member-at-large in 2003. It's important to know that then, as now, there was no support infrastructure for ICIAM: no physical location, no secretarial or IT services, and in fact rather little business for the Council. The Congresses are contracted out to member organizations, who are solely responsible for the finances, the recruitment of speakers, and the entire scientific organization. (This is different from the structure of the International Congress of Mathematicians, which is run by the International Mathematical Union; while each ICM is organized by a different group, which takes much of the financial responsibility, the plenary and invited talks are determined by the IMU itself). The main tasks of the ICIAM officers were selecting the organizers and site of future congresses (typically six years in advance) and selecting committees to determine the recipients of the ICIAM prizes, which had been initiated in 1999. The IT consisted of a rather elementary web interface, which was tended, for a very small fee, by Ross Moore, mathematician at Macquarie University in Sydney, who had been recruited by Ian Sloan. I learned how to register a domain, and hit on the brilliant innovation of signing us up for ten years - by the end of which, of course, we'd completely forgotten how to renew it. The officers met, once a year, in person, usually at the home institution of one of us, and the Board, comprising the representatives of all the member societies, also met once a year, subsidized by the generosity of the society that hosted the meeting. From the moment I joined the group of officers, it was clear to me that this was an extraordinarily pleasant, unaffected, and collegial set of people. By now I have done this sort of volunteer work for a number of societies, and this is one of the best groups I have worked with.
Whenever we believe in a project, we have a strong motivation for it. What was yours? And what kind of contributions did you believe you could make to ICIAM from the very beginning?
When ICIAM was founded, part of the motivation was the feeling that applied mathematics was not respected in the international mathematics community - and that mathematicians who worked in industry or government labs were not warmly welcomed at the ICM Congresses. I attended the ICM in Madrid in 2006. Alfio Quarteroni, who is incredibly famous and a wonderful speaker, gave one of the plenary addresses. There was a talk before his;the large room was full. After the other talk finished, and before Quarteroni spoke, 90% of the people in the room got up and left. Even though I'm not much of an applied mathematician - my area was considered "applied mathematics" when I started my career, but these days you actually need to have an application in mind, not the sort of analysis I do - I was appalled by this prejudice. That might have been in itself a motivation to work for the success of ICIAM. But there's more. One question we've asked ourselves is, "What if the traditional mathematics community accepted the mathematics we do; would there still be a reason for ICIAM to exist?" And here is the other part. The members of ICIAM are applied mathematics societies (and, of course, general mathematics societies that are friendly to applied mathematics); and the members of mathematics societies are people. The societies belong to their members, and through them ICIAM belongs to their members, that is, to people. It's not answerable to governments or to national academies or to university administrations; it's us.
As for what I felt I could contribute: First, the opportunity to be president-elect came as I was ending a four-year position as director of the Fields Institute in Toronto. Fields was a job I had very much enjoyed, and where I felt I had been able to contribute. I felt confident that I could make a difference to ICIAM, and that I would enjoy it. I am from a slightly younger generation than earlier leaders of ICIAM (excepting Rolf Jeltsch, who had joined the ICIAM leadership as President-Elect in 2005). I had a sense that there had also been perhaps a bit of anti-American feeling among ICIAM's leaders, and it was important that US applied mathematicians be seen to be responsible members of the international community. It was also the case that women had not been well-represented in ICIAM leadership; at the time there were very few women who served as ICIAM representatives for their societies, and I could help to make women more visible. Finally, I felt ready to put time and effort into the job. The presidency of ICIAM is not a symbolic or honorary position. The president has to make a time-table, and keep to it; the president has to form committees, to listen to people - and to get people to talk. I didn't come with many fixed ideas, but I was eager to hear other people's ideas, to filter them and to implement them.
Tell us about the process of becoming the fourth president of ICIAM. What were your main proposals and initiatives, and which of them were you able to implement?
Well, the process was a bit confused. I'm happy to have forgotten the details, but there was something irregular about my nomination, and even though I was (I think) the only serious candidate, there were a number of negative votes. In the end, it didn't matter, and I think I was a successful president and was accepted by most societies. The only proposal that was truly mine was ICIAM Dianoia. It was clear to all of the presidents that some sort of communication with members was needed. Other than the officers, no one paid much attention to ICIAM except for the Congresses, and in the years between congresses, people tended to forget ICIAM existed. (As treasurer, it was my job to see that annual dues were collected, so I knew when people weren't paying attention.) My predecessor, Rolf Jeltsch, would write informal emails and send them to the representatives of members societies. But societies would forget who their representative was, or the representative would be the society's current president, and when there was a new president, the information that that person was now the ICIAM representative might not be transmitted. Also, ICIAM began doing more things than just running a Congress once every four years. We had been given an opportunity: At the end of ICIAM 2003, the Congress found it had a surplus of about $25,000, which they donated to the Council. (Most likely previous Congresses had also had surpluses, but they just kept the money.) This was the origin of the "Developing Countries" initiative, which was instituted while I was an officer. It was also the genesis of the convention that ICIAM receives a substantial licensing fee for each congress, which is used to help with expenses of participants from cash-poor societies and to fund fellowships for attendees of selected conferences in developing countries. The "Developing Countries Support" is a modest initiative, but it seems to have succeeded in stimulating some education and research efforts in countries that are trying to grow their mathematical communities.
You have always been an enthusiast of promoting and disseminating actions among the member societies. Proof of this is the implementation of DIANOIA. How do you believe that disseminating these actions can strengthen Applied Mathematics worldwide?
As is clear, I think communication is important. Much research in applied mathematics is collaborative, and I expect that articles in Dianoia will continue to give examples of how applied mathematicians interact with each other and with the wider community.
In your opinion, what should be the main priorities for Applied Mathematics today?
Yikes! I am not arrogant enough to pontificate on this. But here are some thoughts: applied mathematics has the wonderful role of building bridges between mathematical fields ("core mathematics") and other areas, known in jargon as "content domains". When I began my career, 60 years ago, "applied mathematics" meant using perturbation techniques to study partial differential equations that arise in continuum mechanics. In a way, that was a low period; it paid insufficient attention to the role that those bridges had had in strengthening mathematics (the development of modern functional analysis, for example) and in devising structural principles behind other disciplines - biology and social sciences, for example. The description "modeling, analysis and computation" is perhaps fair to the ethos of our subject, but that has always seemed to me to suggest that an applied mathematician specializes in one of the three approaches. What makes this an exciting period for applied mathematics are the number of new subjects that are receiving mathematical scrutiny, and the number of new mathematical tools that are being used to analyze them. If I name only a few, it is not to slight others. Computational capacity has made data cheap and plentiful, giving rise to data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence; probability theory, topology and (of course) partial differential equations come into play. I am fascinated by the sheer diversity of topics and approaches, and I think a priority for applied mathematicians beginning their careers should be sampling some of the recent examples, and using their imaginations to come up with new matches.
- Looking back over the past decade since your presidency, what advancements has ICIAM made during this period?
ICIAM has achieved a good level of maturity; each Congress has built on the preceding one. Congresses have grown in size, in the breadth and quality of talks, and in the diversity of participants. ICIAM appears to have significant financial stability, with funding for prizes now somewhat secure, and with new prizes leading to more recognition for outstanding work. The professionalism of our public-facing presence has increased, with a reasonable web interface (that is targeted for further improvement, it seems). And despite a sentiment I recall from when I was president, that ICIAM had grown to include enough of the applied mathematics world that increasing membership should no longer be a priority, there have been new societies added every year, from more and more parts of the world. It seems to me that it's also the case that the industrial component ("the second I in ICIAM") is now taken more seriously. There seems to be a better, though still not complete, understanding of what it means to engage with researchers employed outside of academia.
- Before ICIAM, you served as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 2005 to 2006. The need for gender equality in mathematics is still a widely discussed issue, and you were already advocating for this cause, addressing female representation. How can we move toward a more just and equitable academic community?
One of the delights of serving an international organization is learning that representation and equity mean such different things in different countries. Because women are not, demographically, a minority of the population, it may be easier in any country to focus on the representation of women in the academic community as a marker for assessing the mechanisms by which decisions are made - decisions about admission to graduate school, decisions about the structure of the workplace, decisions about what professional excellence looks like. Let us note that everyone receives, and needs to receive, accommodation in order to perform optimally in their career. To a successful person evaluating a candidate, "X reminds me of myself" may be a basis for a positive grade. But everyone needs to learn that it's not the only basis.