The London Mathematical Society and British Society for the History of Mathematics are delighted to announce that the 2021 Hirst Prize and Lectureship is awarded to Professor Karine Chemla (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; CNRS), in recognition of her outstanding and innovative work in the history of mathematics. This marks the first year that the Hirst Prize and Lectureship is jointly awarded by the LMS and BSHM.

We are pleased to announce that registration for the conference on the Unity of Mathematics in memory of Sir Michael Atiyah is now open. It will be a hybrid meeting based in the Isaac Newton Institute from Tuesday 21-Thursday 23 September 2021. Funding is available to assist participation, especially for early career researchers.

For its help with the design of the new £50 bank note featuring Alan Turing, the London Mathematical Society (LMS) has been presented with a low serial number (AA01 001936) version by the Bank of England. The presentation took place on 23 June, the anniversary of Turing’s birth, and the day that the new £50 bank note went into circulation.

The London Mathematical Society would like to congratulate LMS Council Member Professor Minhyong Kim on being appointed Director of the ICMS and Sir Edmund Whittaker Professor of Mathematical Sciences at both Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh. Professor Kim is the first full-time director of the ICMS and the first joint professor in the Maxwell Institute and will take up the post in September 2021.  

More details are available on the ICMS website

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has issued a call for nominations of candidates for the Abel Prize 2022.

The Abel Prize, which amounts to NOK 7.5 million, recognises outstanding scientific work in the field of mathematics, including mathematical aspects of computer science, mathematical physics, probability, numerical analysis and scientific computing, statistics and applications of mathematics in the sciences.

The Council for the Mathematical Sciences (CMS) is delighted to announce that Professor Alison Etheridge OBE, FRS, FIMA will be its new Chair. Professor Etheridge is Professor of Probability and member of the Mathematical Institute and Head of the Department of Statistics, University of Oxford. She will become Chair of the CMS in September 2021, succeeding Professor Sir Ian Diamond DL, FBA, FRSE, FacSS, National Statistician.

In February the London Mathematical Society issued a statement in response to a proposal by the University of Leicester to reduce significantly the size of its Pure Mathematics Group and to stop supporting research in this area. We understand that the university has now begun to implement its plans, which include compulsory redundancies, voluntary severance packages, and moving some staff to predominantly (80%) teaching contracts.