ICIAM Dianoia. Volume 8, Issue 3 July 2020

The ICIAM Board meeting is currently scheduled to take place on September 26, 2020 at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, see http://iciam.org/board-meetings, and will be preceded by by a Workshop on Industrial and Applied Mathematics at the same venue on September 24-25. The ICIAM Officers, together with the IMA and the organizers of the Board meeting will make a final determination on the feasibility of an in-person meeting towards the end of July. Please look out for an email from us to confirm the 2020 Board meeting and workshop towards the end of July.

Call for proposals for conference support from developing countries.                                                                     .

A planned proposal for the creation of an Editorial Board Committee. This will be presented to the ICIAM Board at its meeting in September. Comments from readers of ICIAM Dianoia are welcome.

The International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM2019), which took place in Valencia, brought together in Spain more than 4,000 mathematicians from more than 100 countries to share the greatest advances in this discipline that contributes so much to industry and society in general. The authors share their perspectives on the Congress.

The vision of the International Science Council (ISC) is of science as a global public good. The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the importance of this conviction. Scientific knowledge is crucial to dealing effectively with SARS-CoV-2. The natural sciences will help us understand how it works and how it can be combated; the social sciences will enable us to evaluate its social impact; and interdisciplinary approaches will be an essential component of counter-measures to it as well as of efforts to arrive at effective models, solutions and insights in the context of pandemics.

Due to the covid-19 epidemics the organizers of the 8th European Congress of Mathematics and the EMS have decided to postpone it to next year. It will take place in Portorož, Slovenia on 20 - 26 June 2021. One of the innovations at the event will be an online streaming format, with the possibility for full and active E-participation, besides the regular conference format. See https://8ecm.si/news/68 for more information. 

Every four years, the EMS awards its 10 EMS Prizes, along with the Felix Klein Prize and the Otto Neugebauer Prize at the opening ceremony of the European Congress. The postponement of the congress required to innovate about this, so the prizes were announced in May.

ICIAM was one of the partners of the global project 'A Global Approach to the Gender Gap in Mathematical, Computing and Natural Sciences: How to Measure It, How to Reduce It', supported by ICSU and then ISC from 2017 to 2019. To continue and enlarge the work of this project, the partners have established the Standing Committee for Gender Equality in Science (SCGES), which ICIAM has joined.

With COVID-19 practically cancelling all but essential travel, conferences, workshops, and seminars have turned to the virtual meeting space in cyberspace. Conference organizers are finding new and innovative ways to make online meetings fun and enjoyable, including separate channels for informal coffee breaks, slack channels for follow-up questions, and even breakout sessions and mini-symposia. The list below provides a snapshot of some of these meetings and seminar series to promote attendance and emulations. Let's all meet online!