Annual Report 2005 - Fields Institute - University of Toronto

postdoctoral fellows, the institute is home to about twenty
long- and short-term visitors at any time. Postdoctoral fellows
and visitors are here to work on research, to interact
with each other and with the organizers, to communicate
their results and to learn about new problems. At Fields, the
atmosphere for research and collaboration is unequalled,
with the credit going to our excellent staff who handle all
the logistical details, as well as to our splendid building that
seems to inspire creativity, and to the attractiveness of the
city of Toronto.
We are now a few years into our new program of increasing
“General Scientific Activity”, consisting of events that are
not associated with the thematic program, and that may
take place either at the Fields Institute or on the site of one
of our seven Principal Sponsoring Universities (Carleton,
Ottawa, McMaster, Toronto, Waterloo, Western and York)
or at another Canadian university. This was the first full
year with Carleton as a sponsoring university, and we are
delighted at the activities this is stimulating. As an organization
whose mission includes stimulating research and
creating research opportunities, we have been encouraging
proposals for interesting activities, including summer
schools, workshops, lecture series and interdisciplinary
activities. Fields adds value to such activities in several
ways: We have the capability of organizing small and
medium-sized events using our efficient staff and on-line
registration and abstract system, thus freeing the organizers
to concentrate on bringing the best science to their workshops;
our reputation also attracts participants; and our
effective communication system, both electronic and paper,
gets the word out. Perhaps most important, our collective
experience can help organizers learn the ropes of organizing
first-rate events.
“Interdisciplinary” is a word that definitely applies to our
thriving Commercial and Industrial Mathematics programs,
beginning with our ongoing seminars in Quantitative
Finance and in Risk Management. This year we started a
new series in Industrial Optimization, organized by a committee
led by Tamas Terlaky of McMaster, running along
the lines of the Quantitative Finance seminar, with a pair
of speakers (one from a university, one from outside) in
the early evening once a month. In addition, the start-up
companies we incubate, IFID and Sigma, have been joined
by a non-commercial venture: a Centre for Mathematical
Medicine, headed by Siv Sivaloganathan, an applied
M e s s a g e f r o m t h e D i r e c t o r
mathematician at Waterloo, and Amit Oza, an oncologist
at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. The Centre has
already started a seminar series, and plans an opening
this fall, ramping up to a full range of research activities
involving medical researchers and mathematicians, including
joint research projects, graduate courses, postdoctoral
researchers, workshops and seminars aimed at diverse audiences.
Their ambition is to be a nexus for the emerging area
of mathematical research in biomedicine.
Fields reaches out to the community in many ways. Among
them is our continuing presence in education, where,
jointly with the Canadian Mathematical Society, we hosted
a major event in May: a National Forum on Mathematics
Education, which drew an attendance of over 200 teachers,
instructors, researchers and provincial government
representatives from across the country. In addition, we are
active in the fascinating area of communicating mathematics
to the public. For several years, we have helped the Royal
Canadian Institute to offer a couple of mathematically
oriented talks each year. This year, for the first time, we
organized a public lecture in connection with the Clay
Mathematics Institute’s Senior Scholars Program, when
our visitor Eric Zaslow gave a lecture entitled Physmatics in
June.
More and more we find ourselves part of the “community
of institutes”. There are several dozen mathematics research
institutes world-wide – including our fellow Canadian
institutes the Centre de recherches mathématiques and the
Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences and eight US
institutes. The Canadian institutes unite to support an
Atlantic research network, AARMS, as well as to coordinate
special efforts like the launch of MITACS in the mathematical
research community, and the successful bid for the 2011
International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
Beginning with the 2006 prize, the CRM-Fields prize
will change its name to the CRM-Fields-PIMS prize, which
will be jointly awarded by all three institutes. These institutes
have also joined with NRC in an initiative to bring
scientists at the NRC labs into contact with the academic
mathematical community. As a first step, we jointly ran a
workshop in computational biology at CRM in March. In
addition, Fields has undertaken to maintain a list of the
research programs of eleven North American institutes and
the Newton Institute in Cambridge, England. This helps
in planning, to avoid duplication, and we have already
Fields Institute 2005 ANNUAL REPORT 7