AMS Updates Archive

The Life of Julia Robinson

Filmmaker George Csicery ("N is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdos") has started work on a one-hour documentary about the solution of Hilbert's tenth problem by Yuri Matiyasevich in 1970. The film will focus on the role of Julia Robinson, a past-president of the American Mathematical Society. Julia Robinson's story is intended to inspire high school students, particularly girls, to continue their mathematical education.The film is sponsored by the Film Arts Foundation.

NSF Graduate Fellowships Applications Due 11/4/1999

The NSF awards Graduate Research Fellowships to graduating seniors and first-year graduate students. These are three-year fellowships awarded to U.S. students for full-time graduate study at the institution of their choice. Read further for more on the importance of encouraging qualified individuals to apply. Further details about the program and how to apply are available from Oak Ridge Associated Universities, the program administrator. (Item Posted 9/1999)

Free Service for AMS Individual Members

e-CMP is the electronic notification service of Current Mathematical Publications (CMP). This service provides email to individual members noting relevant bibliographic entries from each CMP issue. Members may choose up to three Mathematics Subject Classifications. Notices will arrive approximately every three weeks. (Item Posted 7/1999)

Task Force on Excellence

At a recent conference held at Indiana University, the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and its Task Force on Excellence announced the publication of Towards Excellence: Leading a Mathematics Department in the 21st Century.  The book is aimed at mathematics departments in research universities and calls on departments to understand what their university values. Because undergraduate education is a major focus for many universities, education is important for departments, not to replace research but in order to support it. The book contains advice and analysis of a number of focus groups involving department chairs as well as several meetings with groups of deans. It also contains examples of interesting programs studied during site visits to specific departments and a number of other resources. Copies of the book may be downloaded or ordered at: http://www.ams.org/towardsexcellence/. (Item Posted 06/1999)

AMS and CMS Approve a New Reciprocal Agreement

The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is delighted to announce that a new reciprocal agreement has been approved with the Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) that will take effect for the year 2000 membership year.

Establishment of this agreement between the AMS and the CMS will result in significant savings and benefits for members of both societies and it will not affect, in any way, the present arrangement that exists whereby Canadian institutions can become Institutional Members of the AMS. (Item Posted 3/1999)

Over 500,000 Reviews Added to the Mathematical Reviews Electronic Database

The American Mathematical Society has completed its two-year project of adding full-text reviews from the early archives of Mathematical Reviews (MR) to the MathSci database. During that project, all reviews from 1940-1979 were keyboarded - over 80,000 pages of MR. The number of searchable reviews from 1940 to the present now on MathSciNet totals nearly 1,400,000. The entire collection contains, for the first time online, searchable reviews of a major part of mathematics from the past 60 years. (Item Posted 4/1999)

New AMS Directory of Preprint and e-Print Servers

The AMS has just created the AMS Directory of Mathematics Preprint and e-Print Servers The goal of the Directory is to maintain an updated directory of all mathematical preprint and e-print servers worldwide so that mathematicians can browse through their rich content or post their own research on the server of their choice. (Item Posted 3/1999)

Free Demonstration of JSTOR

JSTOR is a subscription service for institutions that provides electronic access to back issues (excluding the most recent five years) of selected scholarly journals. The mathematics and statistics section currently contains 14 journals, including the Transactions of the AMS, the Proceedings of AMS , the Journal of the AMS, and Mathematics of Computation. A free demonstration using the Transactions from 1900-1920 is now available from the JSTOR Demonstration Database. Complete information about the service is available at that address. More journals, including the American Mathematical Monthly and the American Journal of Mathematics, will be added in the future. (Item Posted 3/1999)

Erdös Lecture Launched in Denton

The American Mathematical Society is introducing the Erdös Memorial Lecture at its upcoming Joint International Meeting with the Sociedad Matematica Mexicana in Denton, Texas on May 19, 1999. The lecture funded by a gift from D. Andrew Beal is to be given annually. This year Ron Graham will talk on a variety of Erdös' unsolved problems in number theory. (Item Posted 4/1999)

Gian-Carlo Rota Dies at 66

Gian-Carlo Rota, Professor of Mathematics at MIT, and former Vice President of the American Mathematical Society, died suddenly during the weekend of April 17. The MIT Mathematics Department will host a public memorial in Professor Rota's honor on Friday, April 30, at 5:00 PM in Building 34, Room 101. All are invited to attend. (Item Posted 4/1999)

April is Mathematics Awareness Month

This year, Texas Instruments, Inc. joins three mathematical societies in sponsoring and organizing Mathematics Awareness Month (MAM). The theme is Mathematics and Biology, and this year's poster is Vital Rhythms: Mathematics in the Heart. The content highlights the contribution mathematical modeling makes in understanding heart function and malfunction through the work of Professor Jim Keener of the University of Utah, and A. V. Panfilov of the University of Utrecht. Professor Keener contributed the theme essay "Mathematics in the Heart."

Complete information on Mathematics Awareness Month 1999 activities can be found on the MAM website. (Item Posted 3/1999)

AMS-MAA Project Preparing Future Faculty in Mathematics

The American Mathematical Society and The Mathematical Association of America, working with the Council of Graduate Schools and the American Association of Colleges and Universities, invite proposals for subawards under a National Science Foundation grant to improve the preparation of graduate students for future teaching positions. Click here for the Request for Proposals from doctorate-granting mathematics departments for projects to prepare future faculty in mathematics (PFF).(Item Posted 2/1999)

San Antonio Spectacular

The Joint Mathematics Meetings held in San Antonio January 12-16, 1999 attracted 3600 registered participants. Among the superb mathematics lectures at the Meetings was the Gibbs Lecture by Nancy Kopell, who described new approaches to mathematical modeling of rhythmic systems in biology. AMS Invited Lecturer Aise Johan de Jong described his recent generalization of Hironaka's famous proof about resolution of singularities (see " Alterations can remove singularities," by Frans Oort in the AMS Bulletin). Sparking animated discussion was a session on the new draft of the school mathematics standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Erich Neuwirth hosted a delightful musical event called ``Eine Kleine (Mathematische) Nachtmusik,'' in which he described the mathematics behind different piano tunings. The Meetings ended with the AMS Banquet, which featured two special honorees, Robert M. Fossum, who is retiring as AMS Secretary after 10 years of service, and Franklin P. Peterson, who is retiring as AMS Treasurer after 25 years of service.

Employment Register

The Society's efforts to help young mathematicians obtain employment have a long history. The Employment Register, a cornerstone of the AMS efforts, has been held for each of the last 47 years at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, with the sponsorship of the wider mathematical community, including MAA and SIAM. In its January 29 issue, the Chronicle of Higher Education highlighted this service in the cover story: "For Job Hunters in Academe, 1999 Offers Signs of an Upturn". (Item Posted 1/1999)

Cathleen Morawetz Awarded National Medal of Science

Former American Mathematical Society President Cathleen Synge Morawetz has been awarded the 1998 National Medal of Science to be presented by President Clinton. She is the first woman to receive the medal for work in mathematics specifically her pioneering developments in partial differential equations and wave propagation applications for aerodynamics, acoustics and optics. Professor emerita at New York University's Courant Institute, she has served the Society in many different elected and volunteer positions. She was elected the AMS' second women President and served from 1995-1996. She currently serves as Chair of the AMS Committee on Science Policy. (Item Posted 1/1999)

NCTM Releases Draft Standards Revision 2000

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) has released a draft version of updated Standards entitled Principles and Standards for School Mathematics. An electronic version of the document (which features a wider range of examples) has been simultaneously released.

The AMS Association Review Group (ARG), previously chaired by Roger Howe (Yale University) and presently chaired by John Polking (Rice University) has provided background reactions in the year leading up to the draft; they will orchestrate an organizational response to the draft this academic year. In addition, we are encouraging individual members interested in commenting on the draft to do so. See the NCTM website for both the text and the interactive electronic drafts of the document and instructions on ordering a hard copy. You may also order a draft by calling (888) 220-7952. (There is a nominal fee for shipping and handling.)

Comments on the draft can be submitted via the webpage, by sending an e-mail message to future@nctm.org or by sending a written response to NCTM, 1906 Association Dr., Reston, VA 20191, Attention: Standards 2000. The deadline for comments is May 1, 1999. (Item Posted 12/98)

Newest Release of MathSciNet

MathSciNet subscribers can now take advantage of several new features and enhancements. See What's New, for the complete list. Highlights include:

• 1970-1974 review text added
• PDF as a display option with hyperlinks
• MathSciNet Quick Starts online
• Searches limited to Current Mathematical Publications entries
• Links to all AMS bookstore items, including the AMS Chelsea Publishing series (Item Posted 10/98)

Symbols Challenge from the AMS

The AMS, as part of a group of scientific publishers, is offering a Symbols Challenge. The goal of this effort is to increase the number of math symbols recognized by Unicode and we need your documentation to help defend the need for these symbols. (Item Posted 11/98)

Prize Winners at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM)

At the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians, Fields Medals were awarded to Richard E. Borcherds, William T. Gowers, Maxim Kontsevich, and Curtis T. McMullen. The IMU Silver Plaque was awarded to Andrew J. Wiles, and the Nevanlinna Prize was awarded to Peter Shor.

The next ICM will be held August 20-28, 2002, in Beijing. (Item Posted 08/98, revised 9/98)

Morita Family Attends Dedication of Gardens

The Morita family from Japan recently visited the AMS to attend a dedication ceremony. The entranceway gardens of the Providence Headquarters were named in memory of Kiiti Morita. His widow Tomiko was accompanied by her son Yasuhiro, his wife Hiroko, and son Shigeo. Kiiti Morita was an eminent mathematician who combined profound work in topology with brilliant insights into algebra.

During the dedication ceremony attended by many AMS staff members, John Ewing presented a Board of Trustees resolution, thanking the Morita family for establishing the Kiiti Morita Fund. Tomiko Morita addressed those attending in Japanese, translated by her son Yasuhiro. She recalled her husband as, "a...delicate, cheerful, honest, and righteous person with fairness and vitality.(Item Posted 09/98)

Eligibility for NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships Has Changed

Applicants must have received the PhD no earlier than January 1, 1997. For application information and requirements, see the NSF Fastlane site or the NSF program announcement. The application deadline is October 16, 1998. (Item Posted 09/98)

AMS Records First Institutional Member Under its New International Program

At the initiative of its Section de Mathématique, the University of Liège in Belgium, is the first institution to become a member of the AMS under the recently established International Program of Institutional Membership. Under this new program, educational institutions outside North America are eligible for institutional membership in the AMS. The program provides benefits comparable to those long available to institutional members in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. These benefits include a 20% discount on subscriptions to AMS journals and on the Data Access Fee for Mathematical Reviews.

Visit the Institutional Membership (International Program) for further details on how to become a member.(Item Posted 09/98)

Meeting Abstracts Now Available Online

Abstracts that are electronically submitted for AMS meetings will now be displayed on the AMS website! Meeting abstracts will be available once they have been approved by the program committee and scheduled in the program so abstracts will not instantaneously appear upon submission. About 90-95% of all abstracts presented at meetings are submitted electronically, so you will be able to view almost all of them online. The first meeting where this new abstract viewing service is available is the Sectional Meeting at DePaul University in Chicago, September 12-13, 1998. Check out the program and its abstracts to see if there is something happening at the meeting for you!(Item Posted 08/98)

Individual Membership Renewal Now Available Online

AMS Individual members may now renew their membership in the American Mathematical Society online. Visit www.ams.org/dues-renewal to pay your dues, update your name or address, and make contributions to development programs. You can also order your free copy of Assistantships & Graduate Fellowships in the Mathematical Sciences, 1998-1999 and change or renew your journal subscriptions. Payment is by credit card and reviewer coupons only.(Item Posted 07/98)

Advance 1999 Membership

Apply now for 1999 AMS membership and we'll extend member benefits you can enjoy NOW through the end of the year until your full membership privileges start in January 1999. While you won't receive your subscriptions to Notices and/or Bulletin until January 1999, you can start enjoying the following benefits: member discounts on AMS publications, inclusion in the Combined Membership List, reduced registration fees at AMS meetings, e-mail forwarding service, and more.

Call our Membership Services department for more information at 800-321-4AMS. Or go to our Individual Membership area and browse our member benefits list. (Item Posted 07/98, rev. 09/98)

Summer Membership Offer

Half-rate 1998 - Become a 1998 AMS member today for half the usual rate and enjoy full membership privileges through the end of the year, including free subscriptions to Notices of the AMS and/or Bulletin of the AMS. (Item Posted 07/98)

Jane Kister Appointed Executive Editor of Mathematical Reviews

On July 1, Jane Kister became Executive Editor of Mathematical Reviews, one of the most important and complex publications of the AMS. Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, MR publishes reviews of books and articles in all areas of mathematical sciences research. The material covered in MR represents virtually all of the worldwide mathematical sciences literature. The reviews are written by a corps of about 13,000 reviewers scattered all over the globe. MR is available through several different media, including through the web product, MathSciNet.

As Executive Editor, Kister will oversee a 70-person staff which will process as many as 67,000 books and articles this year. She succeeds R. Keith Dennis, who has finished his term as Executive Editor and in the fall will return to his position as professor of mathematics at Cornell University. (Item Posted 07/98)

International Congress of Mathematicians,
August 18 - 27 in Berlin

The quadrennial International Congress of Mathematicians will take place in Berlin during August. Information about the program and surrounding events can be found at ICM98. The Fields Medals and the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize are awarded at each Congress. The International Mathematical Union (IMU) supports and assists the ICM. The IMU provides a brief history of the awards and a list of past recipients. (Item Posted 04/98)

Contemporary Mathematics - Electronic Edition

Selected volumes of the Contemporary Mathematics series are now available both electronically and in the traditional print format. The first volume to have an electronic edition is Domain Decomposition Methods 10,  Contemporary Mathematics 218.

The electronic version is available at no additional charge to purchasers of the print volume. Access instructions are provided in the book. There is also the option to purchase only the electronic version. You may order it through our usual outlets, including the AMS Bookstore.

Editors of future conference proceedings who are interested in having an electronic edition of their book should contact  Sergei Gelfand (Director) or Edward Dunne (Editor) at the Acquistions Department of the American Mathematical Society. (Item Posted 06/98)

Celebrating the M. C. Escher Centennial

In honor of the 100th aniversary of the birth of the Dutch printmaker Maurits Cornelius Escher (born June 17, 1898, died March 27, 1972) the AMS is pleased to reprint the article The Trigonometry of Escher's Woodcut "Circle Limit III" by H. S. M. Coxeter, which originally appeared in the Mathematical Intelligencer. (This article is reprinted with the permission of the author, of the publisher, Springer Verlag, and of Cordon Art. All M. C. Escher works © 1998 Cordon Art - Baarn - Holland. All rights reserved. Used by permission.) (Item Posted 06/98)

MSC2000, An Update of the Mathematics Subject Classification

The editors of Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt für Mathematik are pleased to announce that MSC2000, the proposed revision of the 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification, which both journals plan to use as their classification system beginning in 2000, is now available. The final version of the revised classification, MSC2000, will be presented to the community at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin on August 24, 1998. (Item Posted 05/98)

Late Season Hiring Help Available on the AMS website

The 1998 Job Seekers List is now available. A JOB SEEKER announces his or her current availability by entering a name and very brief contact information into this list. EMPLOYERS who need, late in the hiring season, to go back to applications which may have been received months ago, can check for the names in this list to find out who may still be in the job market. The list is active from April through September. (Item Posted 05/98)

Announcing the Student Mathematical Library
An Undergraduate Book Series

The AMS is pleased to announce the Student Mathematical Library, a new series of undergraduate studies in mathematics. By emphasizing original topics and approaches, the series aims to broaden students' mathematical experiences. We hope the books will spark undergraduates' appreciation for research mathematics by introducing them to interesting topics of modern mathematics that are accessible to undergraduates. The books to appear in the series are suitable for honors courses, upper-division seminars, reading courses or self-study. Contact the Acquisitions Department for more information. (Item Posted 03/98, revised 05/98)

Newly Digitized Reviews Now Available on MathSciNet

The American Mathematical Society is pleased to announce that over 175,000 newly digitized, full text reviews from the Mathematical Reviews (MR) volume years 1975-1979 have been added to the MR database. This represents more than 35% of the total reviews to be digitized then added to the MR database over the next 12-18 months, going all the way back to the first MR issues published in 1940. These additional reviews are now accessible to subscribers of MathSciNet. (Item Posted 04/98)

Mathematics Awareness Week 1998
April 26 - May 2
Mathematics and Imaging

Mathematics and Imaging is the theme for Mathematics Awareness Week 1998, which will be observed nationwide from April 26 - May 2. The three mathematical societies organizing Mathematics Awareness Week selected Mathematics and Imaging to highlight the many significant contributions mathematics makes to areas important to our lives. Mathematics is an essential element of imaging in fields as diverse as medicine, computer sciences, and space exploration, and many other settings as well.

Mathematics Awareness Week is coordinated by the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics on behalf of three national mathematical organizations--the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.(Item Posted 03/98)

New NSF Initiative
Mathematicians Encouraged to Apply
Deadlines Quickly Approaching

The National Science Foundation has announced a new initiative entitled Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI). KDI aims to bring together expertise from all areas of science, including mathematics, to focus on a variety of questions in communications and networking, understanding learning and intelligence, and computation. The NSF's Division of Mathematical Sciences sees many opportunities for mathematicians to participate in KDI. Letters of intent are due April 1 and full proposals are due May 8. Click here for further information. (Item Posted 03/98)

Joint Mathematics Meetings, Baltimore, Maryland, January 7-10, 1998.

U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley tells mathematicians to "...teach better mathematics and teach mathematics better." He challenged the mathematics community to find a common ground. "It is perfectly appropriate to disagree on teaching methodologies and curriculum content. But what we need is a civil and constructive discourse."

Lt. Gen. Kenneth Minihan, Director, National Security Agency, says it is vital that government, industry, and academe act as partners in defense of the nation's most valuable assets--our strategic information infrastructure and educational foundation--to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. (Item Posted 01/98)

AMS President Supports Call for Doubling of Federal Investment in Scientific Research Over the Next Decade

AMS President Arthur Jaffe has supported a call for doubling the federal investment in scientific research over the next decade. Both Arthur Jaffe's statement and the unified statement by over 100 scientific society presidents presented on October 22, 1997 are available for review. (Item posted 01/98)

The Increasing Use of Part-Time and Adjunct Faculty is a Major Concern in Academia Today

In late November, ten professional societies, including the AMS, formulated a statement on the use of part-time and adjunct faculty. In addition to presenting facts and figures, the statement points out some of the detrimental effects of over-reliance on non-permanent faculty and strongly urges colleges and universities to avoid excessive or inappropriate use of such positions. The statement includes a set of policy guidelines and suggestions for their implementation. The AMS Committee on the Profession will be studying the statement and possibly make recommendations for AMS action. (Item Posted 01/98)

AMSFonts in PostScript Released

Thanks to financial contributions from a consortium of scientific societies, software developers, and publishers, the AMSFonts in PostScript format are now freely available for public use. They can be retrieved from the AMS website's TeX Resources page. (Item Posted 01/98)

Attention North American MathSciNet Users

The AMS has established a new MathSciNet mirror site in Houston, Texas: http://ams.rice.edu/mathscinet
Learn more about the many new features added to MathSciNet for 1998.(Item Posted 01/98)

A Wealth of Mathematical Resources on a Single CD-ROM

The Mathematician's CD: A Collection of Resources from the AMS brings together a variety of items that have proven useful to the mathematical community. Educators, researchers, students, and librarians now have immediate access to a compilation of valuable information in a convenient CD-ROM format, compatible with Macintosh, Windows, and UNIX. In addition, The Mathematician's CD provides access to up-to-date information with live links to the AMS Web site, and other Web sites. (Item Posted 01/98)