A message from the president / Brief words from the editor-in-chief

Dear members of the EMS,

Welcome to the first issue of the new EMS Magazine. It features new content directions and introduces for the first time the new logo of the EMS. The magazine is planned to appear ‘online first‘ and then will be combined into quarterly issues.

As the last year of living with a pandemic has shown, our usual procedures on how to perform research and communication in the mathematics community are very vulnerable. This means, in particular, that further conferences and meetings have to be cancelled, postponed or held virtually.

This concerns the EMS 30th anniversary which we want to organize in presence and so we have postponed it further. The joint congress of AMS–EMS–SMF in Grenoble that was planned for 2021 has been postponed to 2022 as well. It will take place right after the ICM, in order to create synergies and to avoid too much extra international travel.

We have also just discussed the fate of the European Congress in Portorož and decided that it will be an online-only conference. We truly hope that the mathematical community will still join the conference as if it was a real conference in presence and show its solidarity with the local organisors who put so much work and effort into this.

After many struggles with data protection regulations we have decided to implement a completely new internet performance for the EMS in which we also move to the new layout and new logo, the prototype version is up and running, see euromathsoc.org.

Another very positive development is that our publishing house EMS Press has moved to the subscribe-to-open model and was successful in obtaining sufficiently many subscriptions so that all ten EMS journals could be turned open for the year 2021, see ems.press/updates/2021-02-01-10-titles-announced-oa-s2o.

Finally, as was previously announced, Zentralblatt became an open-access platform from 1st January 2021. The mathematical community is invited to participate in its further development, see zbmath.org.

I wish all of you a healthy spring.

Volker Mehrmann

President of the EMS

Dear readers of the EMS Magazine,

I am sure you are excited to browse and read this first issue of the new EMS Magazine, so I will not take too long in these brief words. It is always a big challenge to improve on something that is already well done, as the Newsletter was. So I sincerely hope you find that in this new Magazine format, the challenge has been successfully met.

This first issue of the Magazine is also the first one to have, as editors, three new colleagues whose names and biographical notes you can read on page 67. We continue the publication of articles by the 2020 EMS Prize winners, this time with articles by Ana Caraiani and Simion Filip, and also by the 2020 Otto Neugebauer Prize winner Karine Chemla. And there is also the first article in a new section about Art and Mathematics.

But it is better for me to stop writing and let you start reading your Magazine. We all hope you enjoy it!

Fernando Pestana da Costa

Editor-in-chief