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CWM News

Here you will find news about CWM related or sponsored events, activities, announcements and awards. Further information on CWM, events for women in mathematics, etc. can be found on the various dedicated pages of the CWM website. Suggestions for CWM News and other themes can be sent to cwm.info@mathunion.org.


Faces of Women in Mathematics film ready!

Happy International Women’s Day everyone!  And a huge thanks to all the CWM ambassadors and contributors to the Faces of Women in Mathematics film!  We ended up getting 146 clips featuring 243 women mathematicians from 36 different countries and speaking 31 different languages.  Thanks also to the CWM of the IMU who supported the project.  We hope you will enjoy watching it!

Film (14 mn 02) here. Trailer (about 2 mn 41) here.

Press release here, devoted FaceBook page here.

Please help us spread the film as widely as possible.  We are proud of all of our fabulous contributors!


Eugenie Hunsicker and Irina Linke

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CWM 2018 Grants awarded

CWM has awarded 12 new grants from €2000o to €3000 for regional activities for women in mathematics in 2018. See here.

Women at the Top in UK Maths Societies

 

For the first time ever, three of the five learned mathematics societies in the UK are concurrently led by female presidents: Caroline Series is President of The London Mathematical Society, Ruth Kaufman is President of the Operational Research Society, and Ineke De Moortel is President of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society. More here.

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New Endowed Graduate Fellowship Established in Honor of Maryam Mirzakhani

We are delighted to announce an $800,000 gift pledge from distinguished engineers and entrepreneurs Dr. Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard and Anousheh Ansari to establish an endowed graduate fellowship in honor of our late colleague, Professor of Mathematics Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017). The Maryam Mirzakhani Graduate Fellowship will support graduate students in the Department of Mathematics at Stanford.

Stanford Department of Mathematics

Christiane Rousseau wins AMS Bertrand Russell Prize!

Christiane Rousseau, Université de Montréal, receives the inaugural Bertrand Russell Prize of the AMS in recognition of her many contributions furthering human values and the common good through mathematics.

Throughout her career, Professor Rousseau has inspired people of all ages and diverse backgrounds through her lectures, publications, and a wide range of activities reaching out to the general public. In particular, through her visionary leadership of the thematic year Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013 and her continuing active involvement in the ongoing activities that grew from it, Professor Rousseau has created opportunities for the mathematics community worldwide to confront crucial challenges facing our planet while highlighting the contributions of mathematicians to the well-being of society.

Christiane served as president of the Canadian Mathematical Society from 2002 to 2004, vice president of the International Mathematical Union from 2011 to 2014, and has been a member of the Scientific Board of UNESCO’s International Basic Sciences Program since 2015. She was named an AMS Fellow in 2013 and won the MAA’s George Pólya Prize in 2014 for her article “How Inge Lehmann Discovered the Inner Core of the Earth” (The College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 45, no. 3). 

Congratulations Christaine!

Maryam Mirzakhani memorial celebration

There will be a memorial celebration of the life of Maryam Mirzakhani on Saturday, October 21st, 3:00-5:00 pm in the Cemex Auditorium, Stanford University.  It is being organized by the Stanford Mathematics Department, with the guidance of Jan Vondrak and the rest of Maryam’s family.

The ceremony will feature reminiscences from family and friends, including some of Maryam’s mathematical colleagues.  It is  also expected that there will  be visual and musical presentations, reflecting her life and interests.

The event will be open to the public, live streamed, and the video later posted online.

The link for the live stream is here.

 

CWM Call 2018

CWM invites proposals for funding of up to €3000 for activities or initiatives taking place in 2018, aimed at either (a) establishing or supporting networks for women in mathematics, preferably at the continental or regional level, and with priority given to networks in developing or emerging countries or (b) organizing a mathematical school open to all with all women speakers and mainly women organisers or (c) other ideas for researching and/or addressing issues encountered by women in mathematics. For more details see here.

Iranian Women Mathematicians First Meeting

Iran

The Iranian Women’s section of the Iranian Mathematical Society held its first meeting on August 21, 2017, in Bu-Ali Sina University which is in Hamedan, a city in the west of Iran.

The meeting was open to all Iranian Women Mathematicians. It was sponsored by CWM.

For more details see the report here (page 9), email contact: w.iranmath@ims.ir, poster here.

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Marina Ratner passes away

Another great female mathematician, Marina Ratner, passed away  on July 7th, 2017. Marina played in a key role in linking up the Russian and western schools of dynamical systems and later became famous for her beautiful theorems on unipotent flows on homogeneous spaces, and their application to questions in number theory, see for example on the blog by Terence Tao here.

The following is taken from the UC Berkeley website: Marina Ratner   Professor Emeritus passed away on July 7, 2017, at her home in El Cerrito, California.  Professor Ratner was educated in Moscow, obtained her doctoral degree at the Moscow State University, emigrated to Israel in 1971, and joined the Berkeley Mathematics Department in 1975. Her work was mainly in ergodic theory and its connections with other parts of mathematics, and earned many honors, including the Ostrowski prize and the John J. Carty Award. She was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She was also an outstanding and beloved teacher and cared deeply about mathematics education.

She is survived by her daughter Anna Ratner, son-in-law Charles Cox, grandchildren Bryan and Maya, and nephews Michael Bialy (a Professor of Mathematics at Tel Aviv University) and Alex Bialy.