The current IMU website has served the IMU well for a long period. However, it was felt that the website could need to be refreshed. Thus we started the project to develop a new website. The aim has been to create a modern and attractive site that allows us to display prominently our flagship events, the ICMs, as well as to make the interaction between the IMU and the Adhering Organizations – our members – more visible also for individual mathematicians. Furthermore, we wanted to give our Commissions and Committees a uniform and modern look on the web – their link to the IMU should be obvious; now we all follow the same template. Finally, a restructured site and modern tools should make it easier to keep the site updated.

The website has been developed by the Berlin based company keylight, and the development has been co-funded by the IMU and WIAS. As everyone challenged with the making of a new website may have experienced, it is much more time consuming than anticipated. But we are soon ready for the launch!  Unfortunately, it will be impossible for us to make it error-free. Please send your comments to office@mathunion.org ; we will try to accommodate them.  I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone in the IMU Secretariat and in the Commissions and Committees for their efforts in this big endeavor.

Helge Holden
Secretary of the IMU

n 2016 the Amsterdam conference on ‘Open Science – From Vision to Action’ hosted by the Netherlands’ EU presidency issued the “Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science. There is a list of twelve action items in this Call for Action. While not all are immediately relevant to Mathematics, they form a package which, if adopted, would seriously improve the openness of mathematics, and also the openness of the evaluation of mathematicians.

This has been followed by the Jussieu Call for Open science and bibliodiversity, in which CEIC’s own Thierry Bouche played a part. It includes an open call for endorsers, and CEIC will be discussing whether IMU should endorse it. It is certainly something we would encourage individual mathematical societies to endorse, as the French SMAI and the European ERCIM have.  It would also be good to encourage our own universities and funding bodies to endorse it, though at that point it has implications for funding models (see item 8). At the very least, mathematicians should make their universities aware of this call. Some of this may seem to be a repeat of old news, given the IMU’s 2001 “Call to All Mathematicians to Make Publications Electronically Available”, but politics and finance move slowly.

One item is missing from both these calls, which is perhaps more specific to mathematics, and that is the support for visually impaired readers. Here CEIC would like to remind everyone of the plea by Emmanuel Giroux, at the bottom of p. 16. He wrote “But please be aware that for a (small but nonzero) number of mathematicians TeX/LaTeX is the only accessible document format”, and it is a pity that even most open-source publishing (arXiv is an honourable exception) still keeps the TeX/LaTeX source hidden.  Hence use of arXiv (possibly as well as institutional repositories, which tend only to accept the PDF) is to be strongly encouraged.

Open Arms program: The Open Arms travel grants subcommittee of the ICM 2018 Organizing Committee is finalizing the selection of applicants for financial support to attend the Congress. The lists of winners will be published in the next few days at www.icm2018.org .

All Open Arms grantees must complete their registration and pay the registration fee by March 27, 2018: failure to do so will result in cancellation of the grant and the corresponding resources being assigned to an applicant on the “waiting list”.

There were 1.565 valid applications, as follows: Asia and Pacific = 903, Africa = 280, Eastern Europe = 138, Latin America = 244. The four regional panels were asked to base their evaluations on academic merit, with a special attention to diversity, including gender balance.

Overall, there are 630 travel grants being awarded, as follows: Asia and Pacific = 200 (60 female), Africa = 130 (44 female), Eastern Europe = 100 (49 female), Latin America = 200 (76 female). In all four regions the percentage of women among the grantees matches or surpasses the percentage of female applicants.

Open Arms is sponsored by IMPA – Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada and SBM – Sociedade Brasileira de Matemática, with a generous contribution from IMU – International Mathematical Union.

Registration to the ICM 2018 in Rio de Janeiro is open. It is recommended to register during the Early Advanced period with discounted registration fees. This period ends by April 27, 2018.

Edition 08 of the ICM Newsletter with important new information is to appear on December 15.

The IMU Committee for Women in Mathematics (CWM) welcomes the mathematical community to the World Meeting for Women in Mathematics - (WM)², a satellite event of the ICM 2018. The (WM)² will bring together mathematicians from all over the world to think about and discuss gender issues in mathematics, its challenges, initiatives, and perspectives for the future, with a strong focus on Latin America.
 

The (WM)² will take place at Riocentro convention center on July 31, 2018. Its program includes research talks, group discussions about gender issues in mathematics, a panel discussion and poster presentation. There will also be a tribute to Maryam Mirzakhani.

Bangladesh has requested to be admitted as an Associate Member of the IMU.  The Mathematical Council of the Americas (MCofA), http://www.mcofamericas.org/, has applied for Affiliate Membership of the IMU.  Brazil has requested a change from Group IV to Group V.
The Executive Committee of the IMU unanimously recommends these applications. The Adhering Organizations will now cast their vote.

The deadline for nominations for the offices of
− IMU Vice Presidents and IMU EC Members-at-Large
− President, Secretaries and Members-at-Large of CDC
− IMU Representatives to ICHM

(for the term 1 Jan 2019 – 31 Dec 2022) has been extended to 15 December 2017.

The IMU Technician Gerhard Telschow retired from his position on November 1, 2017.  We take this opportunity to thank Gerhard for his excellent work for the IMU, and wish him all the best for his retirement. His successor, Frank Klöppel, comes from a position in the Computing Department at WIAS.  We welcome Frank to the IMU Secretariat. The email address of the IMU Technician remains the same:  <technician@mathunion.org>.

The Ramanujan Prize for young mathematicians from developing countries has been awarded annually since 2005. The Prize is funded by the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India (DST). It is administered jointly by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), the International Mathematical Union (IMU), and the DST.

The Ramanujan Prize is usually awarded to one person, but may be shared equally among recipients who have contributed to the same body of work. The Prize is awarded annually to a researcher from a developing country who is less than 45 years of age on 31 December of the year of the award, and who has conducted outstanding research in a developing country.
 
The deadline for receipt of nominations is 1 February 2018. Nominations can only be made by using the online system. See https://e-ramanujan.ictp.it/nominator

Vladimir Voevodsky, a truly extraordinary and original mathematician who made remarkable advances in algebraic geometry, and whose most recent work concerned rewriting the foundations of mathematics to make them suitable for computer proof verification, died at age 51 on September 30 in Princeton, New Jersey. Voevodsky was Professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, a position he held since 2002.

Voevodsky was born in Moscow on June 4, 1966. He studied at Moscow University before attending Harvard University as a graduate student, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1992 under his adviser David Kazhdan. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2002 at age thirty-six for developing new cohomology theories for algebraic varieties, which have provided new insights into number theory and algebraic geometry. Consequences of Voevodsky’s work, and two of his most celebrated achievements, are the solutions of the Milnor and Bloch-Kato conjectures, which for three decades were the main outstanding problems in algebraic K-theory.
(extract of IAS obituary; with permission)

The 6th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) will take place in Heidelberg, Germany during September 23 – 28, 2018.

Applications for participation at the 6th HLF are open in three categories: Undergraduates, PhD Candidates, and PostDocs. See the webpage www.application.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org for the online application and further information. The deadline for applications is February 9, 2018.

The International Council of Science (ICSU) and the International Social Science Council (ISSC) held their General Assembly in Taipei (Taiwan) on October 22-23 2017, followed by a joint meeting of the two councils. The joint assembly decided on the statutes of the new organization and on the merger process in case of a positive vote in favour of the merger. The two councils then held separate votes on the merger, and both councils voted strongly in favour of the merger. The precise results are the following. 

The ICSU members voted for the merger with a proportion of 97.6%.
The ISSC members voted for the merger with a proportion of 90%.
At ICSU, 25 unions out of 25 voted in favour of the merger. 

Then a second vote decided on the name of the new organization: it will be ''International Science Council''. 

The members of the new council are of three types:

1. Member unions and associations, being international scientific bodies devoted to scientific activities (e.g. across a discipline);
2. Member organizations, being academies of science, research councils or analogous not-for-profit bodies
3. Affiliated members, being others (with no voting right).

The legal mechanism of the merger is a merger-absorption process in which ISSC is dissolved, ICSU absorbs, and both the name of the council and its statutes are changed. The dues system remains similar to the one in the former ICSU. In the voting system of the new council, the votes are weighted, and 50% of the weight goes to the members of type 1. 

The founding assembly of the new International Science Council will take place in Paris in 2018, and will elect a new Executive Board. Meanwhile the mandate of the present Executive Board members is extended by one year. 

More details at https://www.icsu.org/current/news/the-icsuissc-merger-explained

The affiliation mentioned for the author of the editorial of the last issue, Hyungju Park, was unfortunately outdated. Prof. Park is now with the Department of Mathematics at Ajou University, Korea. Apologies from the editor.