10 Mar 2019

A Letter from the EWM Convenors

Dear all,

During our term 2016-2018 we have had the opportunity to engage in quite a number of both ongoing and new projects of the EWM.

The main event has been the General Meeting in Graz, in September 2018, which we believe has been very successful with more than 100 participants from over 30 countries. We are very grateful to the co-organizers Karin Baur (KF University of Graz) and Kathryn Hess (EPFL) for their immense dedication, in time and energy. Please also see our meeting report.

Since the membership system and therefore the EWM annual budget is quite stable now, we could initiate the EWM travel grants, that have had two application rounds so far. We also continued co-sponsoring the very successful EMS-EWM summer schools at the Mittag Leffler Institute.

We succeeded to curate a list of former ICM & ECM & EWM invited speakers, prompted and helped by Alessandra Celletti and Marie-Francoise Roy. We will make this visible on our website, with the aim of providing visibility of prominent women in mathematics.

Establishing a new newsletter team coordinated by Anna Cherubini has turned to be essential for the current quality of the newsletter.

A huge challenge has been the preparation of our new website, which is currently in use but still being tested. Many thanks to Olga Kuznetsova, who has been integral for this enterprise!

EWM became an associate member of EMS, which means more visibility for EWM within the European Math community and being part of decision making on the European level. We hope to strengthen collaborations with the EWM coordinators and the national mathematical societies, as well as between the former and the latter.

There are several important projects in progress:

  1. Nominating women mathematicians for prizes and other academic distinctions: To this end, we need to work together with the Women in Math committee of the EMS and the EMS/EWM joint scientific committee, as well as with organizations with similar goals. Also, Susanna Terracini agreed to join the Association for Women in Mathematics (USA) Scientific Advisory Committee to help generate nominations for AMS and SIAM Fellows, major prizes and named lectures of all the major professional math societies including SIAM, AMS, MAA and AWM.
  2. The EWM mentoring system. Please register on the website to be a mentor or if you wish to be mentored, if you feel it’s appropriate for you. It should start working soon.
  3. With the amazing help of the EWM regional coordinators we started to put together country-wise statistics on the percentage of female faculty in their mathematics departments. We encourage further the regional coordinators to send us such data, as these statistics will continue to be updated.
  4. The EWM involvement at the 2020 ECM in Portoroz will consist of organizing some special sessions incorporated in the ECM program that contain survey talks of prominent women mathematicians, a panel discussion, a public lecture and a networking reception on the Sunday before the congress starts. We hope that EWM will be able to award additional travel grants for EWM members who will participate at the ECM. We are glad to count on the support of the local organizers Klavdija Kutnar and Tomaz Pisanski.
  5. Last but not least, the call for organizing the EWM General Meeting in 2022 is still open. Please think of this opportunity to bring EWM to your institution and contact us for more information.

We are sure we are not able to mention here all the people that have been instrumental in achieving so much. We heartily thank them all!

Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb and Elena Resmerita

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