6th European Congress of Mathematics 6ECM: July2-7, 2012 in Krakow (Poland)

02 July 2012 — 07 July 2012 European Mathematical Society

Location: Krakow, Poland

On Monday, July 2, right after the final of the UEFA European Championship, the doors open to the 6th European Congress of Mathematics in the beautiful historic city of Krakow in Poland. Since 1992, the European Mathematical Society (EMS) invites every four years mathematicians from all over the world to this important event. Previous congresses have been held in Paris, Budapest, Barcelona, Stockholm and Amsterdam. This year, the congress is organized by colleagues from the Polish Mathematical Society and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, chaired by Prof Stefan Jackowski (Warsaw). The Polish President, Mr.

Bronislaw Komorowski has accepted the honorary patronage for the congress.

The European Mathematical Society comes back to its roots: In fact, the learned society with members from all over Europe was founded 21 years ago – at a meeting in Poland!

Close to 1.000 mathematicians are expected to participate in the congress that will take place over a whole week at the Auditorium Maximum of the Jagellionian University in the city center of Krakow.

Personal meetings of mathematicians are of crucial importance for the development of mathematics. The general character of the programme provides attendees with a unique chance of an overlook of contemporary mathematics, beyond their own field of research.

Scientific Program

The scientific committee appointed by the EMS and chaired by Prof Eduard Feireisl (Prague) has chosen 10 plenary speakers and 33 invited lecturers who will speak in parallel sessions about new developments, methods and results in all fields of mathematical research. There will be three special lectures, one of them on the occasion of the centenary of Alan Turing, the famous English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist; a second on the coming year on Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013. Among other activities are 24 mini-symposia with short tutorials on hot new mathematical topics and a series of panel discussions on six different topics relating mathematics and society at large.

Other events

Several mathematicians from the Raising Public Awareness Committee of the European Mathematical Society will organize small events “Mathematics in the streets of Krakow” – aided by an interpreter.

Registered participants will have the opportunity to participate in a welcome reception and a conference dinner and to be guided around in Krakow and the vicinity. In the weekend before the congress, the council of the European Mathematical Society will meet in Krakow and, among other items, decide on the location of the 7th congress in 2016 and on the composition of its executive committee. Moreover, the Congress is a generator of scientific activity, as the list of twenty-nine satellite meetings announced on the congress website www.6ecm.pl illustrates.

Highlight: The prize ceremony

Participants are looking forward to the opening ceremony on Monday morning with excitement for a very particular reason: A total of 12 prizes installed by the European Mathematical Society will be awarded by EMS President Prof Marta Sanz-Solé (Barcelona, Spain) to laureates selected by several prize committees.

The monetary value of each prize is 5000 Euro. All prize winners will be invited to deliver lectures at 6ECM.

• First of all, 10 EMS prizes will be awarded to young researchers not older than 35 years in recognition of excellent contributions in mathematics. The prize winners were selected by a committee of around 15 internationally recognized mathematicians covering a large variety of fields and chaired by Prof Frances Kirwan (Oxford, UK). Funds for this prize have been endowed by the Foundation Compositio Mathematica.

Previous prize winners have proved to continue their careers with high success. Several of them have won the most important distinction for young mathematicians, the Fields Medal, of which at most four are awarded every four years by the International Mathematical Union.

Congress participants may thus be able to attend a lecture by a future Fields Medal winner!

• The Felix Klein prize, endowed by the Institute for Industrial Mathematics in Kaiserslautern, will be awarded to a young scientist (normally under the age of 38) for using sophisticated methods to give an outstanding solution, which meets with the complete satisfaction of industry, to a concrete and difficult industrial problem. The Prize Committee that selected the winner consisted of six members, chaired by Prof Wil H.A. Schilders from Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

• For the first time ever, the newly established Otto Neugebauer Prize in the History of Mathematics will be awarded for a specific highly influential article or book. The prize winner was selected by a committee of five specialists in the history of mathematics, chaired by Prof Jeremy Gray (Open University, UK). The funds for this prize have been offered by Springer-Verlag, one of the major scientific publishing houses.

The Opening Ceremony will take place on Monday, July 2, from 9:30 to

11:30 at the Auditorium Maximum of the Jagellionian University in Krakow. An embargoed press release presenting the prize winners will be released soon. Photos of the prize recipients will be available on the web sites of the congress and of the European Mathematical Society immediately after the ceremony: