I just came back from the Mathematical Congress of the Americas in Montreal. It was an intense week of mathematics. Besides having excellent invited and plenary lectures, there were 70 special sessions! There were five plenary lectures: Manuel del Pino (Universidad de Chile); Shafrira Goldwasser (MIT); Peter Ozsvath (Princeton University); Yuval Peres (Microsoft Research); and Kannan Soundararajan (Stanford University). Erik Demaine (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Étienne Ghys (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon) gave well-received public lectures. The list of invited speakers is here.
Demaine advocated for collaboration, pointing out that he had written papers with 429 different people. Not all of those papers are mathematical, but here is the list of his 299 co-authors in MathSciNet. In case you are wondering, MathSciNet’s collaboration distance between the two public lecturers is 4:
| Erik D. Demaine | coauthored with | Noga Alon | MR3040956 |
| Noga Alon | coauthored with | Alexander Lubotzky | MR1948752 |
| Alexander Lubotzky | coauthored with | Rostislav I. Grigorchuk | MR2367034 |
| Rostislav I. Grigorchuk | coauthored with | Étienne Ghys | MR3267516 |
One slide from Jeremy Kahn‘s invited lecture neatly sums up the Virtual Haken Conjecture:
I witnessed a new use of MathSciNet at the MCA. While sitting in one of the invited lectures, a person in front of me was researching the speaker on MathSciNet:
The MCA prize winners were:
- The Americas Prize: José Antonio de la Peña – Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
- The Solomon Lefschetz Medal: Monica Clapp – Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Gunther Uhlmann – University of Washington.
- The MCA Prize: Héctor H. Pastén Vásquez – Harvard University; Vlad Vicol – Princeton University; Pablo Shmerkin – Torcuato Di Tella University and CONICET; Umberto Hryniewicz – Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; Robert Morris – Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA).
The winner of the MathSciNet drawing was Matias Moya Giusti, from Villa Maria, Cordoba, Argentina, who was also the recipient of a travel grant from the AMS.
The AMS exhibit saw a lot of traffic, especially in the mornings. Many people stopped to look at the AMS books, find out about membership, or finish up some details with their travel grants. I talked with lots of people about MathSciNet. It was nice to see how many attendees not only used MathSciNet, but were also reviewers. One day at lunch, I happened to sit next to Hsian-Hua Tseng, who has written over 300 reviews!
The next MCA will be in Buenos Aires in 2021. I hope to see you there!
