Scientific Committee Minutes for April 2023

Minutes for the meeting of BMC Scientific Committee, Tuesday 4th April 2023, from 1710, at Bath BMC

Attendance
The meeting was attended by
Chair: Sarah Rees (Newcastle)
LMS reps: Richard Thomas (Imperial, attending by zoom) Manchester 2024: Charles Eaton, Gareth Jones
Bath 2023: Kirill Cherednichenko, Daniel Loughran
Ex officio: Elizabeth Fisher (LMS, attending by zoom), Simon Edwards (LMS Executive Secretary)
Simon Goodwin (Birmingham) attended as an invited guest, since Birmingham is interested in hosting the BMC in 2027. Karin Baur (LMS rep, Leeds) had intended to attend by zoom, but was held up, and so arrived after the meeting had ended, sent apologies.
Minutes of last Scientific Committee meeting
The minutes of the last meeting, which had been held by zoom on 10th October 2022, were approved.
Immediate impressions on the 2023 BMC
Kirill Cherednichenko presented a brief report on the 2023 BMC; a full report will be on the agenda for the September meeting.
It was agreed by all that the meeting was going very well.
There had been an excellent public lecture on the first (Monday) evening. At the last minute, Colin Wright (who was attending the Outreach sessions) had stepped in to replace the advertised speaker, Katie Steckles, who had just contracted Covid. His lively lecture on the mathematics of juggling had been extremely well received.
The LMS Lecture, given by Tim Browning earlier on the day of this committee meeting, had also gone very well.
Kirill reported that there were 142 registered participants at the BMC. That figure included the 48 speakers at the workshops, but excluded the 18 plenary and morning speakers, and the local organisers, as well as 20 to 30 attenders from Bath and Bristol, who were invited to attend as they wished without registering. So the total number of participants was actually in excess of 200.
It seemed that each morning lecture had an audience of 25-50, each workshop 50-60, and the plenary lectures in excess of 120.
The female:male ratio for attenders as well as speakers seemed to be roughly 1:2. Of the registered participants, 46 were female and 94 male. Of the speakers, 2 plenary speakers were female and 4 male, 4 morning speakers were female and 8 male, 17 workshop speakers were female and 31 male. Two female speakers had had to pull out at the last minute, so this ratio was not precisely as scheduled.
The BMC participants included 86 post doctorate academics, 41 research students and 15 others.
The conference was well sponsored. Spronsors were paying to have stalls, and Maplesoft was paying to give a presentation.
Subject areas of participants had been surveyed at registration. 47 participants had identified themselves as within Algebra, 54 in Geometry, 30 in Probability, 35 in Analysis, 39 in Number Theory, and 29 in Outreach. The Outreach sessions had gone particularly well; the Out- reach morning lecture the following day would be run with question and answers addressed to an on-stage panel of 4 (Colva Roney-Dougal, Chris Budd, Colin Wright and Marianne Freiberger).
The conference dinner would be that evening (after the committee meeting), at the Bath Pump rooms, preceded by a reception at the Roman Baths.
This BMC conference had been expensive, but the organisers had raised funding to cover it, and had drawn from their experience of running the BAMC in 2019.
Update on plans for Manchester BMC 2024
From Charles Eaton. The committee consists of Charles Eaton, Gareth Jones, Omar Leon Sanchez and Donald Robertson. A website has been set up at at https://sites.google.com/view/bmc2024 The email address for the conference is: bmc2024@manchester.ac.uk
There will be 6 plenary speakers, now all selected: Caucher Birkar, Hugo Duminil-Copin, Alan Edelman, Tom Scanlon, Nina Snaith, Corinna Ulcigrai. It was noted that of these 2 are female, 4 male and 2 are fields medallists. There will be 12 morning speakers, and of these 11 are now confirmed; 5 of the 12 are women, with Lara Alcock giving a talk on maths education.
The Manchester BMC will be a little more low key than Bath. The dinner will be run as a buffet in the Turing building, in an attempt to be fully inclusive.
The conference will be run across two locations, with the larger lec- tures held in the Schuster Building (Physics and Astronomy), rather than the Turing Building (Mathematics) where other events (includ- ing the workshops and buffet dinner) will be located; it was noted that the Schuster Building is adjacent to the Turing Building, so that this split is not perceived as a problem. The University of Manchester is charging for rooms, but that cost is being met by the Department of Mathematics.
The schedule will be similar to the Bath schedule. The 7 work- shops will cover Algebra, Logic, Geometry and Topology, Number Theory, Numerical Analysis, Semigroups, Dynamical Systems and Ergodic Theory.
Accommodation will be in local hotels.
June has been chosen as the appropriate time to hold the conference, principally to avoid possible clashes with big football events, also be- cause of the difficulty caused by variation of semester dates across different universities. It is hoped that some events held during the day will attract local school students.
Future BMCs
There was a very brief discussion of potential hosts be- yond 2024. We have already agreed on Exeter 2025 (lead organiser Mark Holland), Cardiff 2026 (Timothy Logvinenko). The selection of Cardiff was a recent agreement, after other unsuccesful approaches, and highlighted the increasing difficulties in universities taking on the organisation of such conferences. Simon Goodwin had been invited to attend the meeting, since he had arrived in Bath with a request that Birmingham be considered as a host for 2027. This will now be discussed.
Date of next meeting
It was agreed that the next committee meeting should be in the first half of October. The date and time would be scheduled using a doodle poll nearer the time.
Any other business
There was no other business.

Sarah Rees 12th April 2023.