Barbara Lee Keyfitz

As announced earlier in Dianoia, and in Wil Schilders' letter this month, beginning with the January 2025 issue of ICIAM Dianoia (Volume 13, Issue 1), Poti Cuminato will take over as Editor-in-Chief of the ICIAM newsletter. Along with the ICIAM Editorial Committee (which will be renewed, as most of the committee members have completed a four-year term), Poti will be working with a team in San Carlos: Raquel Vieira and Leonardo Zacarin. You will find a sample of Leo's journalism in the article in this issue on the annual meeting of SBMAC.

Here is a little bit about them. (See the end of the...

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...

The International Year of Basic Science for Sustainable Development (IYBSSD) has ended, and its successor, the International Decade of Science for Sustainable Development (IDSSD) has begun. This article provides some background on this ambitious venture, which ICIAM is considering to support. (The January 2022 issue of ICIAM Dianoia profiled IYBSSD. You will also find much information on their site, https://www.iybssd2022.org/en/about-us/) The role of mathematics, specifically among the sciences, in sustainability is eloquently explained in the UNESCO publication, Mathematics for Action...

The International Science Council (ISC) has issued two recent papers on scientific publishing, "Key Principles for Scientific Publishing (and the extent to which they are observed)" and "The Case for Reform of Scientific Publishing" .

The ISC will be taking comments on these reports until March 1, 2024. Because a number of the arguments made here are somewhat controversial, ICIAM members are encouraged to voice their opinions by scrolling down to the bottom of the second online report and completing the survey there.

The reports are the product of several years of discussion by international...

A number of satellite meetings in connection with the ICIAM 2023 Congress took place, mainly in Japan, both before and after the Congress itself.

Here is a very brief report on one meeting, the OKO Symposium, organized by Adriana Dawes (The Ohio State University), Seirin Lee (Kyoto University), Atsushi Mochizuki (Kyoto University), and Eamonn Gaffney (Oxford). Its full title was “Mathematical biology from genes to cells to humans” and it took place August 28-31, 2023, at Kyoto University. It was sponsored by an institute at Kyoto University, ASHBi (the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human...

On June 14 and 15, the ISC ran two zoom sessions (to account for different time zones) to introduce the ISC community to an ambitious project that UNESCO is undertaking. In November, 2021, the UNESCO General Assembly formally adopted a 34-page document, UNESCO Recommendations on Open Science ( English language version at https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379949.locale=en).  The report was written by an Advisory Committee (https://en.unesco.org/science-sustainable-future/open-science/advisory-…). Its members are a mix of science administrators, research scientists, and civil...

When Dianoia changed its format from a PDF download to an online newsletter, one of the editorial board's goals was to eventually produce a PDF copy to complement the new version. That day has now arrived. With the efforts of ICIAM's web designer, Robert Carr, Director of Cognimatic Limited, readers now have access to a printable version of ICIAM Dianoia (US Letter or A4 page size). This responds to the requests of some ICIAM members, and in addition provides ICIAM with an archive of the newsletter.

Now when you receive an e-mail announcing a new issue, if you click on the phrase "View this...

Dianoia celebrated its ninth year of publication in 2021, and its third year as an online newsletter.

Overall, things are very good. The editing and publishing interface, set up by Rob Carr, is excellent, and has required only a few minor tweaks. One intriguing one: Some prankster entered about 5000 bogus subscriptions (this greatly slowed down the e-mail distribution of the notice of publication); we now have a captcha-type check for new subscribers, and legitimate subscribers should receive their issues more quickly.

Two things happened in the past year that will enhance the professionalism of...

The purpose of this online forum was to explain the structure and functioning of ISC's Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in Science (CFRS). There were two "copies" of the forum, on two successive days, to accommodate audiences in different time zones. I attended the second; there were 23 or 24 participants, including the ISC presenters. Recordings from both sessions are available at  https://council.science/members/protecting-scientific-freedom-cfrs/

The main presenter at my session was Saths Cooper, Vice-chair of CFRS; the discussion was moderated by Alison Meston from ISC.

The "four...

If you are reading this, you are most likely a subscriber to the ICIAM Dianoia newsletter. However, a strange thing happened over the past year and a half: thousands of subscribers were added to the mailing list. We assume this was caused by some mischievous hack, as most of the addresses were nonsense. To prevent an interminable delay in sending out notices (the server sends them out about 100 at a time, taking about an hour for each batch), our web consultant removed all addresses that were added after September 2, 2019. It is possible that we removed some names of legitimate subscribers...