Mathematics Research Communities

American Mathematical Society, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

The Mathematics Research Communities (MRC) program is a distinctive national program of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) that engages early-career mathematical scientists in topically-focused collaborative research and provides them with mentoring from leading scholars in their fields. Its goals are to train the next generation of mathematicians and to advance the frontiers of scientific knowledge. It pursues these goals by creating research cohorts of early-career mathematicians that will sustain them over time by fostering the development of coherent research programs on important topics throughout the mathematical sciences. The participants, who are advanced graduate students or recent PhDs, take part in a year-long experience that includes: an intensive one-week conference in the summer, during which the participants work on open problems in the chosen research areas; AMS Special Sessions at the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings; support for collaboration travel; and mentoring. Each year's topics are selected by an Advisory Board appointed by the AMS President. This award will support the MRC program over a three-year period from 2020 through 2022. In 2020 and 2021 the summer conferences will serve approximately 120 participants per year, with the number of participants increasing to 160 in 2022. Starting in 2021 or 2020, the program will include at least one MRC focused on a mathematically related topic of relevance in business, industry, or government. Building on its record of including women in the MRC program, the AMS will continue its effort to recruit groups of participants who are diverse in terms of gender, race/ethnicity, geographic location, and employer type. In 2020 this award will support five MRC conferences, which the AMS expects to host at a conference center in West Greenwich, Rhode Island. Their titles are: (1) Dynamics of Infectious Diseases: Ecological Models Across Multiple Scales; (2) Combinatorial Applications of Computational Geometry and Algebraic Topology; (3) Analysis in Metric Spaces; (4) New Problems in Several Complex Variables; and (5) Finding Needles in Haystacks: Approaches to Inverse Problems using Combinatorics and Linear Algebra. The topics for the MRC conferences in 2021 and 2022 will be determined by the MRC Advisory Board, which evaluates proposals submitted by teams of scholars in the mathematical and related sciences. Proposals for the 2021 MRCs are due in September 2019, with the expectation that at least one topic will be in an area of relevance in business, industry, or government. The conferences will bring together senior and junior researchers in an ideal environment to establish connections, and it is expected that participants and organizers will establish long-lasting collaborative relationships and produce many high-quality publications as a direct result of this experience. The website for the MRC program is http://www.ams.org/programs/research-communities/mrc. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.