The letter below is a letter to all Presidents of Mathematical Societies of
European Countries.

It is my strong wish to have a closer contact with your Society members and
I would be very grateful if you forward this letter to them.

With best regards and Happy New Year,
Ari

PS. I suppose that many of the members of the SPb Math Soc know
me, but I assume that there are many younger mathematicians
who never heard of me. So I begin my letter by introducing myself :-).


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Dear Colleague,


Let me introduce myself. My name is Ari Laptev and I am Professor of
Mathematics at Imperial College London and at KTH in Stockholm.
I have been elected as the President of the European Mathematical Society
(EMS) for the period January  2007 - December 2010.

EMS is a relatively new Society which still needs to attract many more
individual members, by providing a service which will meet the needs
of every European mathematician.

Many important aims have already been achieved. Among them is the
establishment of the EMS Publishing House, a non-profit organization,
to which six journals and several book series are already contracted.
It has been responsible for all the publications related to this year’s
International Congress of Mathematics in Madrid.

The EMS plays an increasingly important role in relation to the governing
bodies of the European Union. In particular, it is able to act as an
intermediary for all European mathematicians, in contrast to the more
limited possibilities of National Mathematical Societies.


The EMS promotes the quadrennial European Congress of Mathematics
which awards ten prizes to young European Mathematicians.
It also runs a series of mathematical weekends and supports
European Summer Schools. Many EMS Committees are involved in
a large spectrum of activities.

The EMS Newsletter continues to improve in content and is now a
valuable source of information concerning job opportunities,
new publications, European Conferences, etc. It regularly
publishes interviews with prominent mathematicians as well as
articles of general interest.

Among our ambitions today is the encouragement of a closer
collaboration between Pure and Applied Mathematics. We also plan to
actively draw the attention of the younger generation of mathematicians
to the beauty, diversity and importance of Mathematics.

Our concern is to make the EMS more visible and more efficient in
its promotion of Mathematics within Europe. We must highlight the
significance of Mathematics as a field of competence which is absolutely
crucial to almost all areas of future Science and Engineering.

As far as I understand the most important cite for us is:
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/dc/index.cfm
click on: Ideas: 2006-12-22: ERC-2007-StG

I would like to use this opportunity  to advertise Zentralblatt (ZB).
EMS is one of the three owners of ZB. It recently became clear that ZB
is about to launch an Author Data base of high quality which could be
a good  alternative to MathSciNet.
We have agreed with Springer that this data base will be available,
free of charge, to  all users for three months starting from April 2007.
Moreover, it also has been agreed that all EMS individual  members will
have free access to this Data Base for at least two years.
All members will be provided with a password and be able to log-in from
any computer.


Finally, I wish you a very Happy New Year.

Yours sincerely,
Ari Laptev