Short report for the meeting of the Executive Council of the EMS, November 8-10, 2013

Michel Waldschmidt, 19 October 2013

Our annual meeting in 2013 took place in Linköping (Sweden) on April 20. The next meeting will take place in Berlin on April 26, 2014.

The committee proposes to the Executive Council to renew the members whose first term ends in 2013, and proposes also to invite Fernando Rodriguez Villegas, the new head of the mathematics section from ICTP, to become a member.

The website of our committee provides relevant information: composition (11 members and 11 associate members), activities, book donation, ERCE, twinning project, reports. A new section, which is the home page displays the latest news from the EMS-CDC. For instance there is a report by Andreas Griewank, who was our representative at the 8th Pan African Congress of Mathematicians (PACOM), Abuja, Nigeria. Also our committee published a text for EMS newsletter encouraging authors publishing with Springer to donate their royalties to EMS-CDC.

The book donation scheme continues to be one of our main activities. New donors and recipients are always welcome.

We support students from developing countries to pursue their studies in an institution from a neighboring country in a south-south perspective. Thanks to the support from EMS through our committee, a student from Indonesia is currently preparing a PhD in ASSMS Lahore (Pakistan). We supported the workshop Femmes et Mathematiques of the African Mathematical Union in the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) South Africa, July 17-19, 2013. The support of our committee also allowed a student from Cambodia to participate to a Summer Programme in Mathematics (SPIM) from 17th June to 05th July, 2013 in the Harish Chandra Reasearch Institute (HRI) of Allahabad (India). This student pursues now his studies in India at the Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI).

Our committee initiated the label "Emerging Regional Centres of Excellence" (ERCE). The first ERCE label has been attributed in 2011 to the Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences (ASSMS) in Lahore, Pakistan. In 2013, the ERCE label was awarded to two more institutions - Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas, Mexico (CIMAT) and the Vietnam Institute for Advanced Studies in Mathematics (VIASM). A new call has been issued for 2014.

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