International Congress of Mathematicians
International Congress of Mathematicians | |
---|---|
Status | Active |
Genre | Mathematics conference |
Frequency | Quadrennial |
Country | Varies |
Years active | 1897–present |
Inaugurated | 9 August 1897[1] |
Founders | |
Most recent | 6–14 July 2022 |
Previous event | 2022 |
Next event | 22–29 July 2026 |
Activity | Active |
Website | mathunion.org/icm |
The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU).
The
History
German mathematicians Felix Klein and Georg Cantor are credited with putting forward the idea of an international congress of mathematicians in the 1890s.[3][4]
The University of Chicago, which had opened in 1892, organized an International Mathematical Congress at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, where Felix Klein participated as the official German representative.[5]
The first official International Congress of Mathematicians was held in Zürich in August 1897.[6] The organizers included such prominent mathematicians as Luigi Cremona, Felix Klein, Gösta Mittag-Leffler, Andrey Markov, and others.[7] The congress was attended by 208 mathematicians from 16 countries, including more than 100 from Switzerland or Germany, around 20 from each of France, Italy, and Austria-Hungary, 13 from the Russian Empire and 7 from the US.[4] Only four were women: Iginia Massarini, Vera Schiff , Charlotte Scott, and Charlotte Wedell.[8]
During the 1900 congress in Paris, France, David Hilbert announced his famous list of 23 unsolved mathematical problems, now termed Hilbert's problems. Moritz Cantor and Vito Volterra gave the two plenary lectures at the start of the congress.[9]
At the 1904 ICM Gyula Kőnig delivered a lecture where he claimed that Georg Cantor's famous continuum hypothesis was false. An error in Kőnig's proof was discovered by Ernst Zermelo soon thereafter. Kőnig's announcement at the congress caused considerable uproar, and Klein had to personally explain to the Grand Duke of Baden (who was a financial sponsor of the congress) what could cause such an unrest among mathematicians.[10]
During the 1912 congress in Cambridge, England, Edmund Landau listed four basic problems about prime numbers, now called Landau's problems. The 1924 congress in Toronto was organized by John Charles Fields, initiator of the Fields Medal; it included a roundtrip railway excursion to Vancouver and ferry to Victoria. The first two Fields Medals were awarded at the 1936 ICM in Oslo.[10]
In the aftermath of World War I, at the insistence of the Allied Powers, the 1920 ICM in Strasbourg and the 1924 ICM in Toronto excluded mathematicians from the countries formerly part of the Central Powers. This resulted in a still unresolved controversy as to whether to count the Strasbourg and Toronto congresses as true ICMs. At the opening of the 1932 ICM in Zürich, Hermann Weyl said: "We attend here to an extraordinary improbable event. For the number of n, corresponding to the just opened International Congress of Mathematicians, we have the inequality 7 ≤ n ≤ 9; unfortunately our axiomatic foundations are not sufficient to give a more precise statement”.[10] As a consequence of this controversy, from the 1932 Zürich congress onward, the ICMs are not numbered.[10]
For the 1950 ICM in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
The first woman to give an ICM plenary lecture, at the 1932 congress in Zürich, was Emmy Noether.[13] The second ICM plenary talk by a woman was delivered 58 years later, at the 1990 ICM in Kyoto, by Karen Uhlenbeck.[14]
The 1998 congress was attended by 3,346 participants. The
ICMs and the International Mathematical Union
The organizing committees of the early ICMs were formed in large part on an ad hoc basis and there was no single body continuously overseeing the ICMs. Following the end of World War I, the Allied Powers established in 1919 in Brussels the International Research Council (IRC). At the IRC's instructions, in 1920 the Union Mathematique Internationale (UMI) was created.[10] This was the immediate predecessor of the current International Mathematical Union. Under the IRC's pressure, UMI reassigned the 1920 congress from Stockholm to Strasbourg and insisted on the rule which excluded from the congress mathematicians representing the former Central Powers. The exclusion rule, which also applied to the 1924 ICM, turned out to be quite unpopular among mathematicians from the U.S. and Great Britain. The 1924 ICM was originally scheduled to be held in New York, but had to be moved to Toronto after the American Mathematical Society withdrew its invitation to host the congress, in protest against the exclusion rule.[4] As a result of the exclusion rule and the protests it generated, the 1920 and the 1924 ICMs were considerably smaller than the previous ones. In the run-up to the 1928 ICM in Bologna, IRC and UMI still insisted on applying the exclusion rule. In the face of the protests against the exclusion rule and the possibility of a boycott of the congress by the American Mathematical Society and the London Mathematical Society, the congress's organizers decided to hold the 1928 ICM under the auspices of the University of Bologna rather than of the UMI.[10] The 1928 congress and all the subsequent congresses have been open for participation by mathematicians of all countries. The statutes of the UMI expired in 1931 and at the 1932 ICM in Zürich a decision to dissolve the UMI was made, largely in opposition to IRC's pressure on the UMI.[10]
At the 1950 ICM the participants voted to reconstitute the International Mathematical Union (IMU), which was formally established in 1951. Starting with the 1954 congress in Amsterdam, the ICMs are held under the auspices of the IMU.
Soviet participation
The
List of Congresses
Year | City | Country |
---|---|---|
2026 | Philadelphia | United States |
2022 | Helsinki | Online event[a] |
2018 | Rio de Janeiro | Brazil |
2014 | Seoul | South Korea |
2010 | Hyderabad |
India |
2006 | Madrid | Spain |
2002 | Beijing | China |
1998 | Berlin | Germany |
1994 | Zürich | Switzerland |
1990 | Kyoto | Japan |
1986 | Berkeley | United States |
1982 (met during 1983) | Warsaw | Poland |
1978 | Helsinki | Finland |
1974 | Vancouver | Canada |
1970 | Nice | France |
1966 | Moscow | Soviet Union |
1962 | Stockholm | Sweden |
1958 | Edinburgh | United Kingdom |
1954 | Amsterdam | Netherlands |
1950 | Cambridge, Massachusetts | United States |
1936 | Oslo | Norway |
1932 | Zürich | Switzerland |
1928 | Bologna | Italy |
1924 | Toronto | Canada |
1920 | Strasbourg | France |
1912 | Cambridge | United Kingdom |
1908 | Rome | Italy |
1904 | Heidelberg | German Empire |
1900 | Paris | France |
1897 | Zürich | Switzerland |
- 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The IMU General Assembly took place in Helsinki, Finland, in early July, 2022.[17]
See also
References
- doi:10.1038/056395a0.
- S2CID 4403935.
- ^ The International Mathematical Union and The ICM Congresses. Archived 2021-02-23 at the Wayback Machine www.icm2006.org. Accessed December 23, 2009.
- ^ a b c d e f g A. John Coleman. "Mathematics without borders": a book review. CMS Notes, vol 31, no. 3, April 1999, pp. 3–5
- ISBN 9780821804650.
- )
- ^ In the section Vorgeschichte des Kongresses (prehistory of the congress) of the 1st ICM proceedings, 21 prominent organizers were cited: Hermann Bleuler, Heinrich Burkhardt, Luigi Cremona, Gustave Dumas, Jérôme Franel, Carl Friedrich Geiser, Alfred George Greenhill, Albin Herzog, George William Hill, Adolf Hurwitz, Felix Klein, Andrey Markov, Franz Mertens, Hermann Minkowski, Gösta Mittag-Leffler, Gabriel Oltramare, Henri Poincaré, Johann Jakob Rebstein, Ferdinand Rudio, Karl von der Mühll, and Heinrich Friedrich Weber. (See: Rudio, F., ed. (1898). Verhandlungen des ersten Internationalen Kongresses in Zürich vom 9. bis 11. August 1897. ICM proceedings. BG Teubner. p. 6.)
- ^ Curbera (2009), p. 16.
- .
- ^ a b c d e f g G. Curbera. ICM through history. Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society, no. 63, March 2007, pp. 16–21. Accessed December 23, 2009.
- ISBN 0-8218-1923-2; p. 271
- ^ Michèle Audin, Correspondance entre Henri Cartan et André Weil (1928–1991), Documents Mathématiques 6, Société Mathématique de France, 2011, pp. 259–313
- ^ ISBN 1-56881-330-9; pp. 95–96
- ^ Sylvia Wiegand. Report on the Berlin ICM. AWM Newsletter, 28(6), November–December 1998, pp. 3–8
- ^ ISBN 1-56881-330-9; pp 149–150.
- ^ ISBN 0-387-98358-9; pp. 205–206
- ^ "Decision of the Executive Committee of the IMU on the upcoming ICM 2022 and IMU General Assembly" (PDF).
Further reading
- Guillermo Curbera. Mathematicians of the World, Unite!: The International Congress of Mathematicians: A Human Endeavor AK Peters, 2009. ISBN 1-56881-330-9
- Olli Lehto. Mathematics without borders: a history of the International Mathematical Union Springer-Verlag, 1998. ISBN 0-387-98358-9
- Donald J. Albers, ISBN 0-387-96409-6
- American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 93, No. 1 (Jan., 1986), pp. 3–8
External links
- International Mathematical Congress: held in connection with the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago
- International Mathematical Union: Proceedings 1893–2014
- ICM 1998
- ICM 2002
- ICM 2006
- ICM 2010
- ICM 2014
- ICM 2018
- ICM 2022