Seville, European capital of mathematics

The Mathematics Euro Cup is being played this week in Seville. Today the 9th European Congress of Mathematics (ECM) begins at the Higher Technical School of Engineering of the University of Seville, considered the second most important in the world in the specialty. The meeting, which takes place every four years in a European city and is the second most important in the specialty, beats on this occasion the historical record in attendance of experts (which is close to 1,400, coming from all over the world) and in number of presentations and symposiums. During these days, 10 plenary conferences, 2 special ones, 64 mini-symposiums, 270 thematic communications will be held, as well as invited presentations, workshops and a cultural agenda that includes four exhibitions with mathematics as a backdrop.

The opening ceremony, which took place this morning at the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville, was attended by the president of the European Mathematical Society (EMS), Jan Philip Solovej; the president of the Organizing Committee, Juan González-Meneses, from the University of Seville; and the vice president, Isabel Fernández-Delgado, in addition to the rest of the committee members. Among the authorities, the vice-counsellor of the Department of University, Research and Innovation of the Government of Andalusia, Lorena Garrido, attended; the Secretary General of Research and Innovation, Antonio Posadas Chinchilla; the Vice-Rector for Research of the University of Seville, Julián Martínez Fernández; the Third Deputy Mayor of the City Council of Seville and Delegate of the Cartuja Area, Innovative Parks, Employment, Economy, Commerce and Consumption, Álvaro Pimentel; and the presidents of the EMS Awards juries, professors Pavel Exner, Peregrina Quintela Estévez, Karine Chemla and Patrick Farrell.  

In the words of the president of the European Mathematical Society (EMS), Jan Philip Solovej, “The high level of the presentations and events that will take place throughout the week is beyond the height of the prizes awarded today, the most important in Mathematics at an international level, only behind the Fields Medals”

For his part, the president of the 9EMC Organizing Committee, Juan González-Meneses, from the University of Seville, has highlighted “the great involvement of the Spanish mathematical community and, in particular, of all the Universities of Almería, Málaga and Cádiz, as well as those of Granada and Seville, in the organization of the Congress.” 

Isabel Fernández Delgado, vice president of the Organizing Committee, pointed out that “In front of this building there is a replica of the Nao Victoria, the ship that left the port of Seville in the 16th century to make the first circumnavigation of the Earth. In the same way that this ship opened new paths, we hope that new connections will emerge from this Congress  and significant advances”

The Vice-Minister of University, Research and Innovation of the Government of Andalusia, Lorena Garrido, took advantage of the occasion to highlight that "We have to highlight that Mathematics is one of the most demanded degrees in our Andalusian university offer. (...) It shows us the importance and evolution of this area of ​​knowledge and its high employability"

Likewise, the vice-rector for Research at the University of Seville, Julián Martínez Fernández, has mentioned that “the fact of That Seville hosts this international congress for the first time responds to the high quality of its scientific publications, which we hope will soon be recognized with the seal of excellence.”

The Third Deputy Mayor of the Seville City Council and Delegate of the Cartuja Area, Innovative Parks, Employment, Economy, Commerce and Consumption, Álvaro Pimentel, has intervened to remind attendees that “Seville wants to be, during this week, the best scenario to welcome you and to stimulate the dissemination of a science that is present beyond the walls of universities and research centers. History, architecture, technology or crafts are also mathematics”.

Presentation of 14 prizes to mathematical protagonists

Family photo of the winners, the jury and the Congress organizers. 

The most anticipated thing of the day has been the delivery of the 10 awards from the European Mathematical Society, and four other special awards, which are the most important in Europe in Mathematics, and the second in the world, after the prestigious Fields Medals of international recognition.

Among the special awards, Fabien Casenave, researcher at the French technology multinational Safran, has been the winner of the Felix Klein Award, awarded to mathematicians under the age of 38 whose research helps solve industrial problems. Casenave develops Artificial Intelligence techniques to improve simulations of physical processes.

He Paul Lévy Prize for Probability Theory has fallen into Jeremy Quastel, a professor at the University of Toronto, one of the world's leading experts in probability theory, which he uses to understand the large-scale behavior of systems of many interacting particles. Stochastic equations like KPZ are a challenge for mathematicians. Quastel and his collaborators were the first to find an exact solution to this equation.

On the other hand, the Otto Neugebauer Prize has been delivered to Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze, from Adger University (Kristiansand, Norway). He is a German historian of mathematics, especially known for his historical research on the emigration of European mathematicians during Nazism.

Lastly, the Cornelius Lanczos Award, which is awarded to a mathematician or scientist for the development of outstanding mathematical software, has recognized the MUMPS software library, developed by researchers Patrick Amestoy, Jean-Yves L'Excellent and Chiara Puglisi. MUMPs is a software library for solving systems of linear equations quickly and accurately, based on twenty years of research.

For its part, the EMS grants other ten awards to 10 young mathematicians under 35 years of age, in recognition of his exceptional contributions to mathematics. The winners, who must be of European nationality or have done their work in Europe, were:

• Maria Colombo (EPFL), was a gold medalist at the 2006 International Mathematical Olympiad. Within mathematical analysis, Colombo is an exceptionally prolific and versatile mathematician. A recurring theme in her work is the study of irregular solutions to nonlinear partial differential equations, which describe physical processes and geometric problems.

• Cristiana de Filippis (University of Parma, Italy) Specialist in calculus of variations and in elliptic partial differential equations (which describe the equilibrium states of classical physical systems, such as the electric field created by a distribution of electric charges, or the distribution of temperature in a material).

• Jessica Fintzen (University of Bonn). German, she studied at the University of Bremen and did her thesis at Harvard University. She is currently a professor at the University of Bonn. She received the award for her transformative work in the theory of p-adic group representations, in particular for her spectacular demonstration that Yu's construction of supercuspid representations is exhaustive.

• Nina Holden (New York University, Courant Institute, USA). She works in mathematical physics, complex analysis and probability, in a recent and very active area, connected with statistical physics and quantum field theory. She won a 2021 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize.

• Tom Hutchcroft , British, currently professor at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, for his revolutionary contributions to probability theory and geometric group theory, in particular to the theory of percolation in general graphs, combining geometric techniques, of operator theory, group theory and functional analysis.
  
  

• Jacek Jendrej (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, France). He studies nonlinear partial differential equations that describe the propagation and interaction of waves. These equations have especially interesting solutions, which are observed in many natural phenomena: they are called solitons or solitary waves.
  
  

• Adam M. Kanigowski (University of Maryland, USA). Professor at the University of Maryland, in the United States, he is an expert in dynamic systems, an area of ​​mathematics that studies the evolution over time of all types of processes, and more generally, the concepts of change and transformation.
  
  

• Frederick Manners, University of California San Diego, USA. Manners' scientific interests are varied and include number theory, mathematical analysis and ergodic theory, although his main specialty is so-called additive combinatorics.

• Richard Montgomery (University of Warwick, UK). He is a specialist in combinatorics: the study of discrete structures, such as graphs (an abstraction of objects consisting of interconnected elements, such as a subway network or the neurons and axons in the brain). More specifically, he is interested in so-called extreme combinatorics, which seeks to understand how large these structures have to be for certain properties to emerge.

• Danylo Radchenko (CNRS, University of Lille). Ukrainian, he was a gold medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2007. The jury awarded him the prize for his construction of optimal spherical designs and his pioneering contribution to the new field of Fourier interpolation, as well as for his contributions to the theory of polylogarithms.

Andalusian mathematics, of high international level 

This Congress is held under the auspices of the European Mathematical Society (EMS) and has landed in Seville thanks to the candidacy presented by the University of Seville (US). The president of the Organizing Committee, Professor Juan González-Meneses, has defended the Sevillian project, which was finally chosen by vote against the powerful candidacy presented by Lisbon. The 9ECM Seville 2024 has the experience of the Institute of Mathematics of the University of Seville (IMUS) and the Institute of Mathematics of the University of Granada (IEMATH-GR), both cores of the Andalusian Institute of Mathematics (IAMAT).

The scientific event has its main headquarters at the Higher Technical School of Engineering (ETSI), of the University of Seville, which hosts the main sessions, also counting on the Convention Center of the Barceló Hotel. satellite events are held throughout Andalusia throughout these months and , In addition, the 2024 council of the European Mathematical Society (EMS) was held in Granada last weekend. 

The University of Seville and, in general, the public universities of Andalusia, have top-level international research work in Mathematics, as shown by all the research rankings. The organizers hope that holding this congress at the US will consolidate international recognition of the research carried out by the institution and at the same time will bring the work carried out there even closer to society, which is increasingly convinced of the important role that Mathematics plays in their lives and well-being.  

In addition, 100 mathematics students collaborate as volunteers at this event, and a total of 120 scholarships have been awarded, as part of the international cooperation program, for mathematicians from developing countries. 

A program with plural themes

The lineup of mathematicians invited to give presentations who attend the event brings together the most prestigious at an international level, and they will address a variety of topics. Among the most anticipated speakers, stand out Fabio Tonelli , from the Technical University of Vienna, who in recent work has studied the equation known as KPZ (by Kardar, Parisi and Zhang), which models growth and aggregation processes, such as those of a tumor. , a city or the way a crystal is formed by adding atoms from its environment. Also Annalisa Buffa , professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and expert in numerical analysis with industrial applications who, roughly speaking, will talk about carrying out mathematical simulations and algorithms to test the industrial machines of the future. The Israeli Avi Wigderson , professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, expert in computing theory, algorithm design, cryptography and quantum computing and communication, will be in charge of delivering the special lecture 'Abel Lecture'. For his part, Etienne Ghys , mathematician and professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of the University of Lyon and director of research emeritus at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), will give a lecture on the mathematical formula to score a goal and other informative skills. And, within the national panorama, and more specifically at the University of Seville, Professor José López-Barneo , founder of the Institute of Biomedicine of Seville, will speak in a presentation about the search for a neuroprotective therapy in Parkinson's disease, or Montserrat Vilà , from the Doñana Biological Station, of the Higher Council of Scientific Research (CSIC), who will offer a talk on “Biotic globalization by invasive species”.

Cultural agenda; four parallel exhibitions

As part of the cultural offer associated with 9ECM, four exhibitions that have mathematics as a backdrop will also be exhibited during these days. One of them, " Maps. Cartographic heritage in Seville from the 15th to the 18th centuries ”, which is located at the Cajasol Foundation in Seville; It is a selected collection of maps and books with maps from the period from the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, from the Archive of the Indies, the Columbian Library and the University of Seville. The other three will be on display at the main headquarters, the Technical School of Engineers of Seville: ““A Geometric Walk Through the Alhambra”, in which part of the mathematical secrets present in the Alhambra in Granada are explained; “ Women in Mathematics From Around the World. A gallery of portraits ”, which presents 34 extensive profiles of female mathematicians from around the world, through photographs, texts and videos and “Knots”, aimed at the general public, has ten three-dimensional models of mathematical knots specially selected for their particularities, symmetries and beauty, which guide the visitor through the fascinating world of Knot Theory.