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REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES OF EMS
Tsou Sheung Tsun, Michel Waldschmidt (14.05.12).ACTIVITES
The CDC held it annual meeting on 14 April in Limoges, by kind
invitation of member Michel Thera. Invited to attend were Gert-Martin
Greuel the new Editor-in-Chief of Zentralblatt, and Nick Gill (Open
University) who has been helping us with our website.
We propose to EC the following: Michel Waldschmidt to be Chair and
Giulia de Nunno to be vice-Chair from 2013; Gert-Martin Greuel to
become member. We discussed having some more new members as present
members retire.
We continue to receive donations from reviewers of Zentralblatt, and
for the first time there were online donations through the EMS.
We received a grant of 3200 USD from the IMU Mathematical Library
Assistance Scheme, and of 500 GBP for sending literature to Africa.
With these we were able to send a long run of Mathematical Reviews to
the new Pan African Centre of Mathematics in Dar-es-Salam in Tanzania,
and also mathematics textbooks to Gabon to help the Ramanujan prize
winner Philibert Nang to build up a library in his department. We
also sent, through the generosity of the Clay Institute, a number of
journals to the ERCE in Pakistani, the ASSMS in Lahore.
We are working on refining the list of recipients (institutions and
individuals) who are to receive free access to Zentralblatt.
We continue to have excellent collaboration with all the instituttions
to which our members belong: CEMAT, CIMPA, ICTP, ISP, IMU,
Zentralblatt, etc.
FUTURE PLANS
Since the establishment of the Emerging Regional Centre of Excellence
in Lahore (the ASSMS), we are very encouraged to find more such
centres. Under consideration is one in Vietnam, and possibly one in
the Philippines. We are envisaging sending students from nearby
regions to study in these centres, and we are currently trying to get
funding. It is encouraging that we can identify good students, and we
hope this scheme will continue and get (financial) support. Also we
are thinking seriously on doing something similar in Kurdistan Iraq,
for which we seek support from the Executive Committee, perhaps in the
form of a letter as suggested in the Annex I.
In the same spirit of trying to help mathematicians in various
regions, we would like to draw the attention of the EC of the case of
Cambodia, where a lot of international effort has been made, but it
seems that a letter from organizations such as the EMS would impress
the local authorities with the usefulness and urgency of this effort.
We have also drafted such a letter of support (Annex II) for your
consideration.
Our electronic literature access workshops are successful, and we
think it is certainly something we should continue doing. We have
some support from the IMU, but we lack manpower and this is something
we try to tackle. Our member Anders Wandahl, who is the main person
behind this scheme, is invited to attend an international congress on
electronic literature in Washington, and we hope he will come back
with more ideas.
Our website has been much improved (through the efforts of Nick Gill),
but we hope eventually to be housed within the EMS site. There are
plans to make the site more useful, e.g. to be interactive, and plans
are being disucssed by members Anders Wandahl, Michel Waldschmidt with
Nick Gill.
URL of this website: http://ems-cdc.org
URL of this page: http://ems-cdc.org/IndividualReports/Rpt052012.html
Last modified: June 24, 2012