[Todos CMAT] Fwd: IMU-Net 103: September 2020
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*IMU-Net 103: September 2020*
A Bimonthly Email Newsletter from the International Mathematical Union
Editor: Martin Raussen, Aalborg University, Denmark
CONTENTS
1. Editorial: Mathematical Globalization
2. CEIC: Notes and Comments
3. IMU-Breakout Graduate Fellowships (BGF) awarded
4. News from the CWM
5. IDM 2021 Poster Challenge “Mathematics for a Better World”
6. Sir Vaughan F.R. Jones (1952 – 2020)
7. 2020 Fields Medal Symposium
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*1. **Editorial: Mathematical Globalization*
During a Zoom meeting for presenting M.S. Narasimham the Spirit of
Abdus Salam Award
<https://www.ictp.it/about-ictp/prizes-awards/spirit-of-abdus-salam-award.aspx>
in late August, I spoke on the role ICTP <https://www.ictp.it/>
played in mathematical research and education in China in our recent
history. In the 80s and 90s, after a long period of isolation from
the outside world, the level of mathematical research in China was
not high. Many young scholars were eager to learn advanced
mathematics and tried to be involved in the forefront of
mathematical research. For them, ICTP provided pivotal
opportunities. They were invited to spend some time there, first by
J. Eells and then by M.S. Narasimhan. They learned geometric
analysis and algebraic geometry and returned to China. Many then
went on to become leaders in the Chinese mathematics community, and
they have played a crucial role in the development of mathematics in
China over the last two decades.
Starting in the early 80s, many Chinese students, including myself,
went to the United States for their PhD studies and benefited from
the excellent academic environment there. They had had solid
mathematical training as undergraduates in China and provided an
indispensable source of top-level students for leading American
graduate schools. They interacted with domestic as well as other
international students. Together, they expanded the frontiers of
mathematical research and made their mark in civilization. Some
Chinese students stayed on to become faculty members in leading US
institutions, contributing to mathematical research and education in
their adopted country. For myself, I first studied at UCSD
<https://ucsd.edu/> and then at Harvard <https://www.harvard.edu/>
where I got my PhD. After that, I worked at leading US universities
for many years. In the departments I once worked, more than two
thirds of the graduate students came from abroad and many of my
colleagues held foreign passports. I think that this is still the
case, and I felt lucky to have advised many talented students and
post-doctors who came from different continents. Now I am back at
Peking University where, though filled with many outstanding
Chinese students, I lost the chance to meet and advise top
non-Chinese students. I often told my Chinese colleagues at Peking
University that this is my biggest loss after leaving Princeton
University, and we have to work harder to attract young mathematical
talents from other parts of the world; I believe that it is one of
the most important criteria for us to reach towards a top world
leading university.
Mathematical globalization has existed since ancient times. It is
said that the famous Greek mathematician Euclid traveled to today’s
Egypt and many other places to study mathematics before he completed
his long-lasting book Elements. Because of difficulties in
long-distance travel, the process of globalization was more
restricted and took more time, so did the spreading of mathematical
knowledge. It was not until the 17th century that the Elements were
brought to China. Today, with advancing technology, the world
becomes smaller and progress on famous mathematical problems spreads
almost instantly. International conferences provide good
opportunities for mathematicians to exchange ideas and start
collaborations. People from different parts of the world work
together towards wonderful achievements in research. For instance,
at the Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research, over
the last two years, more than thirty percent of publications by our
faculty were joint with mathematicians abroad. The Chinese
Mathematical Society also made huge efforts to contribute towards
mathematical globalization; we had joint conferences with our
counterparts in other countries, e.g., the American Mathematical
Society. We also co-hosted events with countries along the Silk Road.
Mathematical knowledge has no boundary. I believe that mathematics
will flourish from globalization and benefit all of us from all over
the world.
Gang Tian (Peking University)
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***2. **CEIC: Notes and Comments**
One of the biggest issues with online publication is archiving: how
can we ensure that authoritative copies of published papers are
permanently available? In traditional publication models, this task
is undertaken by librarians, with extra security from the redundancy
of having copies in many libraries. In electronic publishing, the
responsibility often lies with the publisher, who may quit or lose
interest over time. A recent study (“Open is not forever: a study of
vanished open access journals” by Mikael Laakso, Lisa Matthias, and
Najko Jahn; https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.11933
<https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.11933>) finds 176 open access journals
that have not only quit publishing new papers, but in fact stopped
distributing published papers. Some of the journals seem to be
somewhat marginal, but they are nevertheless a real loss for the
scholarly community. The data set from the study
(https://github.com/njahn82/vanished_journals
<https://github.com/njahn82/vanished_journals>) shows that two of
the journals are in mathematics. How many more journals might the
mathematics community lose in the future?
In principle, we know how to solve this problem. Every electronic
journal publisher should partner with a trustworthy, long-lived
organization that will commit to preserving and distributing
published material forever, potentially long after the publisher
disappears (examples include LOCKSS, Portico, CLOCKSS, and PKP PN;
see Table 1 in the study cited above). Furthermore, standardization
is important: it’s best to centralize on a modest number of widely
known organizations, so that we don’t simply shift the problem to
“what if an obscure preservation service disappears?”
Editors of online journals should confirm that a reliable archiving
plan is in place, and communicate this information on the journal’s
website. Otherwise, it’s difficult for the community to identify
unprepared journals.
<https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/more-700-german-research-institutions-strike-open-access-deal-springer-nature>
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***3. **IMU-Breakout Graduate Fellowships (BGF) awarded**
The BGF
<https://www.mathunion.org/cdc/scholarships/graduate-scholarships/imu-breakout-graduate-fellowship-program>
Selection Committee of the Commission for Developing Countries CDC
<https://www.mathunion.org/cdc/> has completed the evaluation of the
nominations to the BGF program received for the 2020 call during the
month of September. Three students were awarded a BGF grant to
complete a PhD program in their home countries: Benin, Indonesia and
Uganda.
IMU-CDC very much appreciates the generous donations from all the
Breakthrough Prize winners that allow funding the BGF grants.
The 2021 call will be announced in due time.
More information:
https://www.mathunion.org/cdc/scholarships/graduate-scholarships/imu-breakout-graduate-fellowship-program
<https://www.mathunion.org/cdc/scholarships/graduate-scholarships/imu-breakout-graduate-fellowship-program>
See also the interesting article by Della Dumbaugh that appeared in
the September 2019 Issue of the AMS Notices:
https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201908/rnoti-p1294.pdf
<https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201908/rnoti-p1294.pdf>
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***4. **News from the CWM**
*STOP PRESS*. CWM Vice Chair Carolina Araujo has been named winner
of the 2020 Ramanujan Prize for young mathematicians from developing
countries:
https://www.ictp.it/about-ictp/prizes-awards/the-ramanujan-prize.aspx
<https://www.ictp.it/about-ictp/prizes-awards/the-ramanujan-prize.aspx>
Carolina Araujo, from the Instituto Nacional de Matematica Pura e
Aplicada in Brazil (IMPA) works in Algebraic Geometry. She is the
second woman to be awarded the Ramanujan Prize, the first being
Sujatha Ramdorai in 2006.
*a. First meeting of the Standing Committee for Gender Equality in
Science (SCGES)*
The first (virtual) meeting of SCGES, a permanent organization
founded by nine unions and partners including IMU, took place on
September 12, 2020. A group of three people were appointed to follow
up actions between the meetings of the committee: Catherine Jami
(IUHPST) as chair, Guy Smagghe (IUBS) as vice-chair and
Marie-Françoise Roy (IMU). The next steps involve the choice of the
logo and the launching of the website, before the end of 2020.
Catherine Jami and Marie-Françoise Roy will represent SCGES at the
scoping meeting of the International Science Council (ISC
<https://council.science/>) on their project in development “Gender
equality in Science: from Awareness to Transformation”, planned in
October. The hope is that other ISC members will join SCGES.
*b. Congratulations to Luna Lomonaco for the UMALCA Prize 2020.*
The UMALCA Recognition Prize
<https://www.umalca.org/eventos/premio-reconocimiento-umalca/>
recognizes young mathematicians who have done work of exceptional
quality and who are permanently working in a country in Latin
America and the Caribbean. Since 2000, the prize has been awarded
every 4 years, to 1 to 4 mathematicians. The
4 recipients of the UMALCA Prize 2020 were announced at a virtual
ceremony on September 14, 2020. Luna Lomonaco (IMPA, Brazil) became
the first woman to be awarded the prize.
https://www.umalca.org/2020/08/ceremonia-premios-umalca-2020/
<https://www.umalca.org/2020/08/ceremonia-premios-umalca-2020/>
*c. CWM Meeting in 2020*
CWM holds a (virtual) meeting on 5 and 6 October 2020.
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***5. IDM 2021 Poster Challenge “Mathematics for a Better World”
The theme for the next International Day of Mathematics, on March
14, 2021, is “Mathematics for a Better World.” We are inviting
school students and math lovers in general to join us in the
countdown to the celebration by participating in our worldwide
Poster Challenge, where we explore mathematics as a universal language.
To participate, create a poster that is sharing one idea to make the
world a little bit better using mathematics. Instead of words, use
images combined with numbers, formulas, geometric shapes, or other
mathematical elements to express your idea, so people worldwide can
understand it. You can send us your poster until February 15, 2021.
We will share the best submissions on the IDM website.
Learn more at https://www.idm314.org/2021-poster-challenge.html
<https://www.idm314.org/2021-poster-challenge.html>
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*6. ***********Sir Vaughan F.R. Jones (1952 – 2020)***
Sir Vaughan Jones died aged 67 on September 6, 2020, following
complications after a severe ear infection. An inspired and
inspiring mathematician of exceptional originality and breadth, his
enduring work brought together several disparate areas of
mathematics, from analysis of operator algebras, to low dimensional
topology, statistical mechanics and quantum field theory, with major
impact and unexpected, stunning applications, even outside of
mathematics, as in the study of DNA strands and protein folding in
biology. A crucial idea leading to these striking connections was
his groundbreaking discovery in the early 1980s that the symmetries
of a /factor/ (an irreducible weak* closed algebra of operators on
Hilbert space), as encoded by its /subfactors/, are /quantized /and
generate quantized groups, a completely new type of structures,
endowed with a dimension function given by a /trace /and an /index
/that can be non-integral.
Vaughan Jones was born on December 31, 1952, in Gisborne, New
Zealand. He was educated at Auckland Grammar School and the
University of Auckland, where he earned a bachelor of science and a
master of science with first class honors. He then received a Swiss
government scholarship and completed his PhD at the University of
Geneva in 1979, under the supervision of Andr´e Haefliger and Alain
Connes, with his thesis awarded the Vacheron Constantin Prize. He
was a Hedrick assistant professor at UCLA in 1980-1981, at the
University of Pennsylvania 1981- 1985 and was then appointed full
professor at UC Berkeley in 1985. From 2011 on, he held the
Stevenson Distinguished Chair at Vanderbilt University, while also
being professor emeritus at UC Berkeley.
Already in his thesis work, Vaughan Jones was interested in the
classification of finite groups of automorphisms (“classical
symmetries”) of a class of von Neumann algebras called II1 factors,
following up on Connes’ classification of single automorphisms. He
developed a novel, algebraic approach, where the action of the group
was encoded in the isomorphism class of a subfactor. Soon after,
this led him to consider abstract subfactors together with a natural
notion of relative dimension, that he called /index/, and to study
the values it can take. By late 1982, he made a series of amazing
discoveries. On the one hand, the index of a subfactor can only take
values in the discrete set {4 cos2(π/n) | n ≥ 3} or in the
continuous half-line [4, ∞). On the other hand, all these values can
actually occur as indices of subfactors, and, indeed, as indices of
subfactors of the most important II1 factor, the so-called
/hyperfinite /II1 factor (the non-commutative, quantized version of
the unit interval). The proof involved the construction of an
increasing sequence of factors (a /tower/), obtained by “adding”
iteratively projections (i.e., idempotents) satisfying a set of
axioms which together with the trace provide the restrictions.
Shortly after, Jones realized that his sequences of projections give
rise to a one-parameter family of representations of the braid
groups and that appropriate re-normalizations of the trace give rise
to a polynomial invariant for knots and links - the /Jones polynomial/.
This immediately led to a series of spectacular applications in knot
theory, solving several of Tait conjectures from the 19th century.
More importantly, it completely reinvigorated low dimensional
topology, igniting totally unexpected developments, with an exciting
interplay of areas, including physics, and a multitude of new
invariants for links and 3-dimensional manifolds, altogether leading
to a new brand of topology, /Quantum Topology/.
This revolutionary work had also a huge far-reaching impact in the
theory of II1 factors and operator algebras, posing exciting new
questions about the classification of subfactors and of the
quantized groups they generate. Many outstanding results by a large
number of people have followed. Jones was much involved in this
development, notably finding the best way to characterize the
group-like object arising from the tower of factors (/the standard
invariant/), as a two dimensional diagrammatic structure of tangles
called /planar algebra/ (1999), and then classifying them up to
index 5, in a remarkable programme developed with some of his former
students (2005-14). This, together with a quest to produce conformal
field theory from subfactors, led Jones to a study of the Thompson
groups and again to unexpected spin-offs for the theory of knots and
links (2015-2020). In a parallel development, which started in 1983,
the connection was made with calculations by Temperley and Lieb in
solvable statistical mechanics, triggering yet another series of
connections with physics, statistical mechanics, conformal quantum
field theory, where a similar dichotomy of discrete and continuous
parts of the central charge occurs.
Vaughan Jones was awarded the Fields Medal in Kyoto in 1990, and was
elected Fellow of the Royal Society in the same year, Honorary
Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand 1991, member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993 and of the US National
Academy of Sciences in 1999, foreign member of national learned
academies in Australia, Denmark, Norway and Wales. He received the
Onsager Medal in 2000 from the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology (NTNU). In 2002 he was made a Distinguished Companion of
the NZ Order of Merit (DCNZM), later re-designated Knight Companion
KNZM. The Jones Medal of the Royal Society of New Zealand is named
in his honor.
He had a strong commitment of service to the community. In 1994 he
was the principal founder and Director of the New Zealand
Mathematical Research Institute, leading summer schools and
workshops each January. He was Vice President of the American
Mathematical Society 2004-2006, and Vice President of the
International Mathematical Union 2014-2018.
Vaughan had a very distinctive and personal style of research in
mathematics. His warmth, generosity, sincerity, humor and humility
led him to thrive on social interaction, and for the mathematical
community to significantly benefit from his openness in sharing
ideas through every stage of development from initial speculations
and conjectures about the way forward, to the discussion and
explanation of the final results. His presence both at formal and
informal events and his regular interaction with mathematicians,
especially graduate students, including his own, of which he had
more than 30, enriched all who came into contact with him. Vaughan
regularly mixed his passion for skiing and kite-surfing with hosting
informal scientific meetings at Lake Tahoe, Maui and his family
retreat in Bodega Bay. His love for rugby was legendary, as was the
fact that he wore an All Blacks jersey for his plenary at the ICM in
Kyoto following the award of his Fields medal. His other major
passion was music, choral singing and orchestral playing, shared
intimately with his family and friends. Vaughan is survived by his
wife Martha (Wendy), children Bethany, Ian and Alice and
grandchildren. He will be dearly missed by his family and the many
friends all over the world.
David Evans (Cardiff, UK), Sorin Popa (UCLA, USA)
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*7. ***********2020 Fields Medal Symposium***
The Fields Institute <http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/> is delighted
to announce the 2020 Fields Medal Symposium, to take place October
19–23, 2020 hosted online by the Fields Institute in Toronto,
Canada. For the first time, both the Scientific Program
<http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/activities/20-21/fieldsmedalsym> and
the Public Opening
<http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/activities/20-21/fieldsmedalsym-opening> event
will be hosted virtually, presenting a unique opportunity for
participants to join in from around the globe. The Symposium will
honour Alessio Figalli (Fields Medal 2018, ETH Zürich), and will aim
to bring the general topic of optimal transport to a broader
audience and present recent development in related areas of
research. The Scientific Program will be centred on Figalli’s work,
and its current and potential impact.
There will be a Public Opening on October 19, 2020 at 12:30pm EDT.
It will feature an introduction to Figalli’s work by Franceso
Maggi (University of Texas at Austin); an interview with Figalli, a
panel discussion and Q&A (hosted by Hannah Fry, University College
London) with Figalli, Maria Columbo (École Polytechnique Fédérale de
Lausanne), and Ingrid Daubechies (Duke University), Robert McCann
(University of Toronto), and Cédric Villani (Fields Medal 2010 &
Member of Parliament, French National Assembly); and messages from
esteemed dignitaries including Carlos E. Kenig (President,
International Mathematical Union) and Her Excellency the Right
Honourable Julie Payette, Governor General and Commander-in-Chief of
Canada.
For more information, please visit
http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/activities/20-21/fieldsmedalsym
<http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/activities/20-21/fieldsmedalsym>
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