[CvGmt News] IMU-Net 30: July 2008
The Electronic IMU Newsletter
imu-net at mathunion.org
Sun Aug 3 10:42:19 CEST 2008
IMU-Net 30: July 2008
A Bimonthly Email Newsletter from the International Mathematical Union
Editor: Mireille Chaleyat-Maurel, University Paris Descartes, Paris, France
CONTENTS
1. Editorial
2. IMU on the Web
3. ICMI: the new Executive Committee
4. EMS Prizes
5. Shaw Prizes
6. 7th PACOM
7. Subscribing to IMU-Net
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. EDITORIAL
Dear Reader,
this is summertime, the season of big conferences. You will find below
news about ICME-11, the international congress of ICMI and about the
5th European Congress of Mathematics.
As usual, this issue contains the regular column "IMU on the Web".
I am also pleased to inform you that our colleague, the mathematician
Alf Onshuus from the University of Los Andes (Bogota, Colombia) has
been released by the FARC.
I wish you a good vacation.
Mireille Chaleyat-Maurel
Editor
------------------------------------------------------------------------
2. IMU ON THE WEB: The digitization of the ICM proceedings and related
material
One of the projects the CEIC is pursuing is the digitization of all
the Proceedings of the International Congresses of Mathematicians to
make them readily accessible to the public.
The whole material consists of 62 printed volumes with a total of more
than 35000 pages. The last three ICMs (Berlin, Beijing, Madrid)
produced electronically born proceedings while everything earlier was
only printed and hence will be digitized.
The actual state of the metadata can be seen here:
http://www.math.uni-bielefeld.de/~rehmann/icm_proceedings.html
The list starts a few years before the first ICM of 1897 in Zürich
with the Chicago Congress, held in 1893 on the occasion of the World's
Columbian Exposition at Chicago, which gave birth to the ideas of
international mathematical congresses and to the International
Mathematical Union as a whole.
Felix Klein, in a talk on "The Present State of Mathematics",
described the tendency of mathematics to become more and more
specialized, and therefore evokes ideas for unifying our science and
our scientific efforts, by saying:
"A distinction between the present and the earlier period lies
evidently in this: that what was formerly begun by a single
master-mind, we now must seek to accomplish by united efforts and
cooperation. A movement in this direction was started in France
some time since by the powerful influence of Poincar'e. For
similar purposes we three years ago founded in Germany a
mathematical society, and I greet the young society in New York
and its Bulletin as being in harmony with our aspirations. But our
mathematicians must go further still. They must form international
unions, and I trust that this present World's Congress at Chicago
will be a step in that direction."
(Quoted from "Felix Klein: Present State of Mathematics", Mathematical
Papers read at the International Mathematical Congress, 1893, p. 133-135.)
After having collected the copyrights -- which we eventually got --
our production process goes by first finding a copy of the respective
proceedings volumes, and then in most cases -- horribile dictu for all
bibliophiles -- by cutting them into single pages. This is a
reasonable way to make use of an automatic page feeder.
The University of Michigan Library gave permission for the use of
their images for the years 1897 through 1924.
Scanning is done with 600 dpi, since we found out that this is
necessary for good quality. Math requires the readability of second
order indices, which are typically of 5 point size.
Of course, the next step then is to run the scanned images through an
optical character recognition process in order to make the volumes
searchable.
In the final setup, the single articles of the respective proceedings
will occur with their titles on dedicated web-pages as it is custom by
now in E-journal postings.
Display formats will be DJVU and PDF, but we will also make the
scanned images publicly available, and we will encourage sites to
mirror the collection, as this will contribute to its longevity: The
more copies exist, the more likely is its survival in the long run.
For all who want to help: In addition to the ICM proceedings, we would
like to digitize related material like Programmes, Abstracts, Short
Communications etc.
Here we do not have all the items -- we mostly do not even know what
was published at all. Some of this material is already listed in the
metadata web page mentioned above. In case you are aware of or
possibly even have and want to donate material which isn't listed,
please contact one of us:
Keith Dennis (dennis at rkd.math.cornell.edu)
Ulf Rehmann (rehmann at math.uni-bielefeld.de)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. NEW ICMI EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
A new Executive Committee of the ICMI-International Commission on Mathematical
Instruction, was elected at the ICMI General Assembly held July 6 in
Monterrey, México.
ICMI is an official commission of IMU and till now the election was
held at the General Assemblies of IMU. It was the first time that the
ICMI General Assembly elected the Executive Committee of ICMI; this
was decided by the IMU General Assembly held in Santiago de
Compostela, August 12-13, 2006.
The members of the 2010-2012 ICMI EC, with the various positions held, are:
PRESIDENT:
William Barton (New Zealand)
SECRETARY-GENERAL:
Jaime Carvalho e Silva (Portugal)
VICE-PRESIDENTS:
Mina Teicher (Israel)
Angel Ruiz (Costa Rica)
MEMBERS AT LARGE:
Mariolina Bartolini Bussi (Italy)
Sung Je Cho (Korea)
Roger Howe (USA)
Renuka Vithal (South Africa)
Zhang Yingbo (China)
The term of this next EC will start on January 1, 2010.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
4. EUROPEAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY (EMS) PRIZES
THe EMS Prizes are awarded by the European Mathematical Society in
recognition of distinguished contributions in mathematics by young
researchers not older than 35 years. THe prizes are presented every
four years at the European Mathematical Congress.
The 2008 winners are:
Artur Avila (Brazil, France), Alexei Borodin (Russia, USA), Ben Green
(UK), Olga Holtz (Russia, USA), Bo'az Klartag (Israel, USA), Alexander
Kuznetsov (Russia), Assaf Naor (Israel, USA), Laure Saint-Raymond
(France), Agata Smoktunowicz (Poland) and Cedric Villani (France).
The Felix KLein Prize, established by the EMS and the Institute for
Industrial Mathematics, is awarded to a young scientist (or a small
group of young scientists), not older than 38 years, for an
outstanding solution of a difficult industrial problem.
The second Felix KLein Prize winner is Josselin Garnier (France)
For more information:
http://smf.emath.fr/PrixDistinctions/PrizewinnersbookEMS2008.pdf
------------------------------------------------------------------------
5. SHAW PRIZES
The Shaw Laureates 2008 in Mathematical Sciences are:
Professor Ludwig Faddeev, Director of Euler International Mathematical
Institute (Steklov Institute of Mathematics, St. Petersburg, Russia) and
Professor Vladimir Arnold, Chief Scientist of Steklov Mathematical
Institute (Moscow, Russia)
for their widespread and influential contributions to Mathematical Physics.
See
http://www.shawprize.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------
6. 7th PACOM
The president of the African Mathematical Union (AMU) has decided to
cancel the 7th PACOM that was scheduled to be held in Cairo (Egypt) in
August 2008.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
7. SUBSCRIBING TO IMU-NET
There are two ways of subscribing to IMU-Net:
1. Click on http://www.mathunion.org/IMU-Net with a Web browser and go
to the "Subscribe" button to subscribe to IMU-Net online.
2. Send an e-mail to imu-net-request at mathunion.org with the Subject-line:
Subject: subscribe
In both cases you will get an e-mail to confirm your subscription so
that misuse will be minimized. IMU will not use the list of IMU-Net
addresses for any purpose other than sending IMU-Net, and will not
make it available to others.
Previous issues can be seen at:
http://www.mathunion.org/Publications/Newsletter/archive
____________________________________________________________________________
IMU-Net is the electronic newsletter of the International Mathematical Union.
More details about IMU-Net can be found at: http://www.mathunion.org/IMU-Net/
You can find here, for instance, detailed information about subscribing to
the IMU-Net mailing list and unsubscribing from it.
More information about the News
mailing list