Scientific Committee Minutes for September 2021

British Mathematical Colloquium Scientific Committee Minutes for the meeting of Thursday 16th September, 1400-1600, on zoom.

Attendance :
Chair: Sarah Rees (Newcastle)
LMS reps: Karin Baur (Leeds), Richard Thomas (Imperial)
EMS rep: Sophie Huczynska (St Andrews)
Glasgow 2021: Michael Wemyss
KCL 2022: David Burns
Ex officio: Elizabeth Fisher (LMS), Caroline Wallace (LMS).
Kirill Cherednichenko attended, as organiser of the 2023 BMC in Bath.
Minutes of last Scientific Committee
Meeting by zoom on 8th April 2021 @ the Glasgow BMC, were approved.
Report on the 2021 BMC
Michael Wemyss gave a full report on the Glasgow BMC, which had been run online, April 6-9 2021, jointly with the BAMC. It had been delayed for 12 months by the pandemic. There had been 880 participants, 761 from the UK, across 85 UK affiliations, 119 from outside the UK, across 94 non-UK affiliations. Of those participants, 37% has been postgraduate students and 29% had been early career researchers. The female:male split had been 26:71 (30:69 had been expected for the originally scheduled, in-person event).

Feedback had been collected from participants. The conference had been applauded as one of the best online conferences of the year. The public lecture by Moon Suchin had been particularly successful.

Budgeting for the BMC had not been easy, but in fact the conference had made a profit; this had then been returned to funders in proportion to the grants they had given.

Money had been due to the ICMS in Edinburgh for work they had already done for the 2020 conference, before its postponement. However the ICMS had then offered its services free of charge for the 2021 conference. A lot of effort had been put into the design of the registration form for that conference.

Conference income had come mainly from grants of 17K from LMS, 5K from GMJT, 6K from EMS, 4K from QJMAM, a selection of smaller funders, and also from the registration fees. It had been difficult to budget because of uncertainty over the number of participants. Software support had been provided by mathdept.org They had unexpectedly reduced their fees, and this had put the conference into profit.

Michael commented on some very positive aspects of the organisation of BAMC. He had been glad to benefit from those by running a joint conference. Organisation of the BAMC is facilitated by the fact that it has a float, of approximately 30K, which it carries between conferences. It also has a culture of high attendance by postgraduate students.
A BMC email list
Michael Wemyss had suggested that it would be a good idea to set up a BMC email list, which could be transferred from one BMC to the next. This would be particularly relevant this year, when more than 12 months would elaps between the April 2021 BMC in Glasgow and the June 2022 BMC at KCL. It had been suggested that the LMS might host a an email list.

Elizabeth had been approached about this and now reported. There were questions from Caroline. Some input and responses to Caroline's queries were provided by Michael.

The LMS might host a list. Michael would need to set up an email to all BMC attenders, which would be sent on behalf of the LMS, and which would ask them to go to the LMS site to register for the list. A webform would have been set up for this purpose. There would be a need for quality control, but most of the checks could be automatic.
Update on plans for KCL BMC
David Burns report. The KCL BMC would be held from 6th to 9th June 2022. There would be one public, 5 plenary, 10 morning lectures. There would be 5 workshops, with 4 speakers in each, on the subjects Analysis, Geometry, Number Theory, Statistics and Theoretical Physics. Two women had been chosen as plenary speakers, six women as morning speakers. The organisers were looking to attract a big name for the public lecture, and an invitation had recently been sent out, with a response now being awaited.

LMS funding had been applied for and been awarded. In general rooms had been provided without charge, but there would be a charge for the reception rooom. Accommodation was being arranged for speakers, but other participants would be expected to find their own accommo- dation. It was very difficult to predict the numbers of participants.

The KCL team did not have the capacity to run the BMC successfully on-line, but were relying on being able to run an in-person event. The website was about to go live.
Future BMCs
Future BMCs in Bath (2023, organised by Kirill Cherednichenko), Manchester (2024, organised by Charles Eaton), Exeter (2025, organised by Mark Holland) had already agreed. Exeter had now indicated that it would like to run a joint BMC-BAMC event. The committee agreed that this would be possible.

Newcastle had suggested that it might run the 2026 event, and this suggestion was accepted. NB: this is now considered to be provisionally agreed, and is being further considered by Newcastle. Kirill Cherednichenko talked to the committee about his plans for a BMC in Bath. His commitee had already been meeting regularly to discuss their plans. They proposed dates of Monday 3rd to Thursday 6th April 2023, running from lunchtime on the Monday to lunchtime on the Thursday.

He asked about the deadline for funding applications, and was told he should apply by 22nd January for a meeting on 26th February. But Caroline told the committee that the LMS would have less funds to award to the BMC after KCL, that it was expected to reduce the grant to 15K.

Bath was currently considering speakers, and they would send their proposed lists to the BMC commitee in early December.

There would be 5 plenary lectures (one on each of Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and two on Wednesday), in addition to a public lecture on the Monday, and workshops in Geometry, Algebra, Analysis, Prob- ability, Number Theory and Outreach. The subject matters of the plenary lectures would correspond to those of the workshops (with the public lecture corresponding to outreach).

The AGM and the conference dinner would both be on the Tuesday, with the AGM scheduled for 1630-1700.

It was anticipated that there would be 180-200 participants.
Date of next meeting
The next meeting would be at the KCL BMC.
Any other business
There was no other business.

Sarah Rees 1st Oct 2021