Updated the 3rd Nordic EWM Summer School INFO

Find out new info about the 3rd Nordic EWM Summer School, which will take place June 22-27 2009,

HERE ……. 3rdsummerschoolposter1

EMS/EWM Scientific Committee

Dear all,

The proposed new Scientific Committee, consisting of twelve leading
women mathematicians, has now been established jointly by the European
Mathematical Society (EMS) and EWM. The membership of the committee
is as follows:

Viviane Baladi (ENS, Paris, France)
Eva Bayer-Fluckiger (Lausanne, Switzerland)
Christine Bernardi (Paris VI, France)
Christine Bessenrodt (Hannover, Germany)
Antonella Grassi (U Penn, USA)
Ursula Hamenstaedt (Bonn, Germany)
Dusa McDuff (Stony Brook, USA)
Ragni Piene (Oslo, Norway)
Vera Sos (Renyi Institute, Budapest, Hungary)
Ulrike Tillmann (Oxford, UK), chair
Nina Uraltseva (St Petersburg, Russia)
Michele Vergne (Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France)

The committee’s remit is to provide advice to the EMS and EWM
on scientific questions involving women and mathematics, such as
suggesting scientific topics and speakers for the biennial EWM
meetings. Its members are currently being asked for advice about the
next EWM general meeting, which will be held in Novi Sad in
August 2009, and the 3rd Nordic summer school (June 2009).

With best wishes,
Sylvie Paycha (Chair, EMS Committee for Women and Mathematics)
Frances Kirwan (Convenor, EWM)

The 2009 European Mathematical Society lecturer

The 2009 European Mathematical Society lecturer will be Professor Ingrid Daubechies of Princeton University, and she will give some of her EMS lectures at the 14th general meeting of EWM, which is to be held in August 2009, at the Department of Mathematics and Informatics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Serbia. Professor Daubechies will also , as EMS lecturer of the year 2009, give presentations at NuHAG (Numerical Harmonic Analysis Group), the University of Vienna.

Ingrid Daubechies has had a significant impact in numerous areas of applied mathematics and signal and image processing, with research accomplishments bridging across many scientific and engineering disciplines, resulting in over 100 publications and an influential and widely-read book. Her service record is also impressive, most notably in science and engineering publications as well as professional societies. She has directed programs with high impact on young scientists in a variety of fields. She is an inspiration to the entire mathematics community, especially to the women’s mathematics community.

Ingrid Daubechies received her BS and PhD in Physics at the Free University in Brussels, where she also taught for 12 years. She then moved to AT&T Bell Labs where she served as a leading authority on wavelet theory. Since 1993, she has been at the Mathematics Department and the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. She became the first woman full professor in mathematics at Princeton University. She now holds the William R. Kenan Jr. Professorship.

Professor Daubechies has also received many awards and honors, including the Louis Empain Prize for Physics, MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, AMS Steele Prize for Exposition and Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences. She was also awarded the International Society for Optical Engineering Recognition of Outstanding Achievement and the IEEE Information Theory Society Golden Jubilee award for Technological Innovation. In 2000, she became the first woman to receive the National Academy of Sciences Medal in Mathematics. She gave the Gibbs Lecture in 2005 and the Noether Lecture in 2006.

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Meet Frances Kirwan

Today we have a great pleasure to introduce Frances Kirwan. 

Frances gave us permission to publish her letter prepared for the publication in the EWM newsletter.

 

Dear EWM members,

 

The editors of the EWM newsletter have asked me to write a letter introducing myself to everyone, as I am the new EWM convenor. I would like to start by saying how pleased I was to be asked to be involved with EWM, as I think it is an excellent institution.

 

My first serious contact with EWM happened when I helped to organise an EWM workshop on moduli spaces in Oxford in 1998, and it was such a refreshing change to be in an audience of mathematicians with women in the majority. Unfortunately I missed the EWM meeting this September, so my most recent experience of being surrounded by women mathematicians was in Princeton in May, when I took part in the Women in Mathematics programme set up by Karen Uhlenbeck, which the Institute for Advanced Study hosts each year. This year the theme was algebraic geometry, where (together with symplectic geometry) my main research interests lie, and it was very enjoyable and stimulating to be there.

 

So what is my mathematical background? Well, I was an undergraduate in Cambridge, and then a graduate student working with Michael Atiyah in Oxford in the early 1980s. That was a very exciting time … there was a group of very lively students including Simon Donaldson (my future husband, Michael, was another), and many visitors such as Raoul Bott (who, very sadly, has recently died), Dan Quillen and Cliff Taubes, who all came for long visits. Next I spent a couple of years as a Junior Fellow at Harvard, which was equally exciting, before returning to Oxford where I have been ever since. I was President of the London Mathematical Society from 2003 to 2005 (not, I am pleased to say, the LMS’s first woman president … I followed in the illustrious footsteps of Mary Cartwright, who was LMS President in the 1960s), and for those two years it felt as if I was spending as much time in London as in Oxford, though in fact it averaged at most one day a week.

 

My research interests are in moduli spaces in algebraic geometry, in geometric invariant theory (GIT), which was developed by David Mumford in the 1960s in order to construct and study moduli spaces, and also in the link between GIT and moment maps in symplectic geometry. At Harvard I was lucky to be able to talk to David Mumford (who at that time was moving away from algebraic geometry towards computer vision, but was still happy to help a postdoc like me) and on the symplectic geometry side to Shlomo Sternberg and Victor Guillemin (at MIT). While I was at Harvard, I was also lucky to receive invitations to visit from two leading women geometers: Karen Uhlenbeck (then in Chicago) and Dusa McDuff (at Stony Brook) … those visits made big impressions on me. After my first daughter was born in 1988 I did much less travelling, though I did take her to Berkeley for a sabbatical visit when she was about six months old. My children are now aged 19, 17 and 15, so they can more or less look after themselves these days.

I spent two later sabbaticals in Australia, which is where my husband grew up.

I found the time difference between Australia and Canada, where my collaborator Lisa Jeffrey is based, very efficient for collaboration by email: I would work on something during the day, email any progress or questions to Lisa in the evening (my time) which was morning for her, and then she would work during her daytime and her response would be waiting for me when I got up the next morning!

 

The EWM’s next get-together will be a half-day meeting on Sunday 12 July, immediately before the European Congress in Amsterdam, organised jointly with the EMS Women in Mathematics Committee. The next general meeting will be in 2009, and Dusanka Perisic (EWM treasurer) has very kindly offered to host it at her University of Novi Sad; it will take place over the four days 25-28 August 2009. So I’ll look forward to meeting as many EWM members as possible in Amsterdam in 2008 and/or Novi Sad in 2009.

 

With best wishes to everyone,

 

Frances Kirwan

EWM Convenor

Why EWM?

Dear EWM members,

One of the questions which was raised at the EWM meeting in Cambridge in September, was “Do we still need EWM”? The answer seemed to be a loud YES, but there was not enough time for a lot of discussion.

I would like to bring the question back in the form of a newsletter article, for which I need your thoughts. Therefore I would like to invite you to answer the following questions:

-Why do we still need EWM?
-What should the role of EWM be in the mathematical society today?

Thank you!

I would also like to remind everyone of the deadline for the newsletter, December 15th. Contributions are warmly welcome!

Best wishes,
Aasa Feragen
Newsletter editor

Audio report on EWM Cambridge meeting

Plus Magazine has recently published an audio report on EWM Cambridge meeting in Plus Podcasts - Maths on the move

Marianne Freiberger, who is the author of the report , recorded the atmosphere at  the EWM meeting and made interviews with two leading mathematicians, Caroline Series and Cheryl Praeger.

If you want to hear it, please click on the following link: http://plus.maths.org/podcasts/PlusPodcastOct07_2.mp3

EWM Mailing Lists

 

Elizabeth Baldwin is a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Oxford, associated to the Somerville College as a junior research fellow. She works with Prof. Frances Kirwan, and her research is in algebraic geometry; to be more precise, it is in geometric invariant theory and moduli spaces of stable curves and stable maps.

Elisabeth is in charge of EWM mailing lists. We have asked her to tell us something about the lists, and here’s her answer:

The ewm-all mailing list connects European women academic mathematicians, allowing them to advertise jobs, fellowships and conferences, particularly the ones of special relevance to women in mathematics. It is associated with the organisation of European Women in Mathematics.

With around five postings per month, this is not a high volume list. There are about 170 people currently subscribed. Details on how to subscribe are given at http://www.math.helsinki.fi/EWM/info/mailinglist.html

There is another list, ewm-uk, specially designed for women working in the UK, which is used to advertise events of more local interest. Instructions for joining can be found at the same place.

There was a third mailing list, ewm-discuss, but it has not been used in recent years and EWM has decided to promote the blog of EMS Committee to a discussion forum instead.

Elizabeth Baldwin

 

On EWM

Marjo Lipponen and Paula Steinby has prepared a multimedia presentation on EWM.

You can find it on the page EWM multimedia presentation.