A message from the president

I am close to concluding my first year as president of the EMS. It has been a very busy and exciting time. Before my time as president I had not worked very closely with the EMS and as I have already mentioned in a previous message, I spent this year learning the inner workings of the Society. Perhaps the most important thing that I take away from this year, and what I see as the main strength of the Society, is the large and wide-ranging number of mathematicians throughout Europe who work very hard and enthusiastically alongside and for the Society. Indeed, there is a lot of work to be done. I never miss a chance to highlight the importance of our publishing house, the EMS Press, which is by far the main activity of the Society. We, however, do much more than this. To mention some of our core responsibilities: we organize conferences, support young mathematicians, e.g., through our young academy EMYA, engage with funding agencies like the ERC, promote mathematical outreach activities, support mathematicians from less developed regions in and outside of Europe, and in general work to increase the diversity and inclusivity of the mathematical community. To get a sense of the activities supported by the EMS, I encourage you to look at our web page and, in particular, to note the new list of calls for applications and nominations that we have gathered.⁠¹⁠https://euromathsoc.org/calls We also have a very strong social media presence. If you do not already, please consider following us on LinkedIn, Mastodon, or X. We have Richard Elwes, our publicity officer, to thank for our strong and engaged social media presence. Since you are reading this message, you are of course already aware of our Magazine, and I hope you continue to enjoy it.

I wanted to make sure to mention all of this because I believe our level of involvement in the mathematical community has reached a point that requires the EMS to make a real investment in improving and professionalizing its infrastructure and its tools for community building. This will be one of our main goals in the coming year. With the help of Elvira Hyvönen from our Helsinki office and the EMS Press staff, we have already worked on a new members’ database which will be launching very soon.

Among the activities I highlighted above I did not mention the important work done at zbMATH Open, which is our openly available mathematical database edited by EMS in collaboration with the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure. I left it out above only because I wanted to take the opportunity now to thank the zbMATH Open editor-in-chief since 2016, Prof. Klaus Hulek, who will be stepping down by the end of this year. Prof. Hulek has worked very hard for zbMATH Open and has been a driving force in making the database successfully open and available to all. I want at the same time to welcome our new editor-in-chief, Prof. Christian Bär, who will take over in 2024. I am looking forward to working with Prof. Bär in securing the continued success of zbMATH Open.

I am afraid I will have to end this message on a somber note. We have all witnessed the eruption of violence near the boundaries of Europe, first in Ukraine and now lately in the Middle East. A lot of innocent people have become victims of this violence. This has inevitably affected many of our colleagues and their families. I do hope for better times for them and for all of us in the near future.

Jan Philip Solovej

President of the EMS

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   https://euromathsoc.org/calls