International Review of Mathematics

International Review Home Page

Report 8 - November 2003

The Chair of the International Panel, Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, visited London on 17 September for a meeting with Martin Taylor (Chair of the Steering Group), Stephen Huggett (Scientific Secretary) and Peter Cooper (representing the Council for Mathematical Sciences).

This was a very fruitful meeting, discussing all aspects of the plans for the Review, and it enabled us to refine the details of the visits to the eight venues, the briefs for the landscape documents, and the involvement of the Steering Group during the Review week.

As a result, the Steering Group meeting on 18 September was an especially useful one.

We considered reports from the various venues, noting with approval the draft programme of presentations at Bristol and the collaboration between Bristol and Durham over the presentation of research in probability. We also responded to several specific questions which had been put to us about these presentations and more generally about the visits.

We reviewed and agreed the plans for the background briefings to be given to the Panel while they are in London.

We considered in more detail than before the data document to be provided to the Panel before the Review week. This will contain background information (largely statistical, but some descriptive) on the structure and funding of the mathematics and statistics community in Britain, and in particular we considered which aspects of a bibliometric analysis would be useful. Here, as elsewhere, contributions from Jean-Pierre Bourguignon were invaluable.

Finally, we considered the landscape documents, endorsing Professor Bourguignon’s views on them and agreeing a refinement of the brief. It is a pleasure to be able to report that at the time of writing they are arriving thick and fast, and to thank the authors for their hard work on this difficult task.

Work continues on finalising travel and accommodation arrangements for the Panel.

Please monitor the website for the latest developments. There is a contact point on the Review website for feedback (irm@lms.ac.uk). Please use this to send in your own comments and suggestions.

Stephen Huggett
Scientific Secretary to the Review