General Information

The Swiss Mathematical Society organizes an Annual Meeting in spring with a public lecture. The meeting also includes the General Assembly of the society. Moreover, the SMS hosts a Fall Conference which is dedicated to a scientific topic.

For a list of past conferences, please see the Archive. To announce a conference or propose a Fall Conference, please send an e-mail to norbert.hungerbuehler@math.ethz.ch. Conference advertisements then appear on the front page of the Swiss Mathematical Society.

If you need financial support to organise a congress in Switzerland in year N, please send a request to the president of the SMS, best before end of June of year N-1, and at the latest before December 15.

Reports on Conferences and Events

2022
The Let's Talk About Outreach week and its Math'émerveille Festival
SwissMAP Research Station (Les Diablerets), October 23-29, 2022

The Let's Talk About Outreach week brought together mathematics outreach actors. With more than 50 participants from 7 countries and about 20 institutions, this week was enriching and productive. The mornings were dedicated to conferences: 9 outreach specialists had been invited to describe their activity and present their views on popularization. The afternoons were devoted to workshops: the goal was to share experience and create new activities for the general public. The week could not end without a practical application: the Math'émerveille Festival invited all those who wished to come and discover mathematical concepts while having fun. The general public could enjoy a mathematical juggling show, a dozen stands as well as an escape game.

Climathics Workshop
Les Diablerets, November 28 to December 3, 2022

A week during which 50 mathematicians looked at the math associated to the climate crisis. They investigated the equations behind the biodiversity collapse, explained by Christian Mazza, Louis-Félix Bersier and Xavier Richard, as well as the ones that would give a sustainable power grid, as described by Philippe Jacquod, and considered the laws behind exceptional events or causality, explained by probabilists and statisticians Valérie Chavez and Quentin Gallea. They also studied carbon footprint computations and its correlation with well-being, explained by economist Julia Steinberger, while another economist, Florence Hugard, described how finance could work for climate. The participants also learned about disinformation mechanisms, presented by climate specialist Martine Rebetez.


2023
12th Swiss-French Workshop in Algebraic Geometry
Charmey, 30 January to 3 February, 2023

The 12th Swiss-French Workshop in Algebraic Geometry took place on 30 January to 3 February 2023 at the Centre de Vacances VIVA GRUYERE in Charmey, with a historical participation of 52 researchers and two family caretakers. The mini-courses, each consisting of five lectures, were given by Xavier Caruso (Université de Bordeaux), Nguyen-Bac Dang (Université Paris-Saclay) and Victoria Hoskins (Radboud University Nijmegen). Six additional talks, 50min each, were given by postdocs and PhD students. The familiar atmosphere promoted many mathematical discussions and networking opportunities, with young and advanced researchers discussing easily and freely.

SMS Doctoral Day
Neuchâtel, March 14, 2023

The 2023 edition of the SMS Doctoral Day held at Université de Neuchâtel. It hosted more than 40 participants from all Switzerland. The event started by some welcoming words by Alain Valette and continued by 10 short talks by PhD students and postdoc on different mathematical subjets. The Day ended with a plenary talk by Dr. María Cumplido Cabello from the University of Sevilla on Mental health during the PhD. The participants also discussed about their works and exchanged and shared their experiences during the social part of the program.

Fribourg MAPS
Fribourg, April 13-15, 2023

The workshop Fribourg MAPS (Metric Analysis, Parametrizations, Surfaces) was attended by approximately 40 participants from Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. In addition to nine 50-min presentations by invited speakers and a poster session, the three-day event offered ample opportunities for networking across different career stages and different subfields of geometric analysis such as analysis on metric spaces, geometric measure theory, conformal and quasiconformal mappings, and geometric group theory. The organized networking activities facilitated the interaction between researchers who have not previously met. According to participants’ feedback, the conference overall, the talks, the choice of research topics, as well as the emphasis on networking opportunities were successful and appreciated.

Borel Seminar on Lattices in Negative Curvature
Les Diablerets, July 17-21, 2023

Together with her colleagues Martin Deraux (Grenoble) and Vincent Emery (BFH Biel), Ruth Kellerhals performed the conference on Lattices in Negative Curvature as a Borel Seminar within the traditional CUSO maths series, and this during the period July 17 - 21, 2023, in the Hotel Les Sources at Les Diablerets.
The conference covered various topics in the realm of real, complex and quaternionic hyperbolic geometry. The number 23 of participants was small though, and in particular the number of CUSO PhD students was lower than expected. On the other hand, the scientific quality of the invited speakers was exceptionally high, and their lectures were outstanding. The mini-course speaker Alexander Kolpakov unfortunately had to cancel his venue at the very last moment, but he could be replaced in an excellent way by Alan Reid (Rice) and Pavel Tumarkin (Durham). All speakers, from the mini-courses to the individual lectures, were best prepared for the younger participants and offered the audience a good introduction to and perfect overview of their research topics. From the very beginning, the familiar atmosphere favored the desired exchange and many stimulating conversations. Highly valuable contacts between younger and established mathematicians were made immediately.
For this reason, the main organizer Ruth Kellerhals, together with her PhD student Naomi Bredon, will organize a Junior Borel Seminar 2023 at the University of Fribourg in early December, giving all younger participants the opportunity to present their own research results and to further deepen the existing contacts.
All details of the Borel Seminar 2023 are available on the corresponding webpage (click title above).
The organizers and all participants thank the SMS responsibles and the other sponsors for their generous support.

Young Topologists Meeting
Lausanne, July 24-28, 2023

The Young Topologists Meeting is an annual, international meeting of topology students primarily at a doctoral level. The biggest conference of its kind, each year, the event rotates between the major European topology centres of KTH, the University of Copenhagen and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne.
The 2023 Young Topologists meeting was held at EPFL in July 2023. The event was run for over 170 mathematics masters and doctoral students from all over the world, with participants from every continent attending and presenting. Since it's inception, the YTM has provided a crucial stepping-stone for early-career researchers to enter the academic community and a platform for other to engage with their work.
As part of the conference, 40 participants were invited to give presentations of their work and another 40 to give poster presentations. This conference provides an important opportunity for students to present their work to a large audience that is largely unavailable in regular conferences, in addition to facilitating international collaborations and academic networking opportunities.
A feature of the event was plenary talks from Marc Hoyois (University of Regensburg) and Katharine Turner (Australian National University), both leading academics in their respective fields. Marc Hoyois presented 3 lectures on motivic homotopy theory, and Katharine Turner on the persistent homology transform. Both topics were met with enthusiasm and well-received by the attendees.
Thanks in large part to our sponsors, the organisers were able to provide accommodation for many of the speakers and poster presenters. In particular, this meant accessibility for participants from diverse backgrounds and institutions with access to limited funds.

Ventotene International Workshop
Ventotene, September 11-23, 2023

The VI Ventotene International Workshop took place in Ventotene (LT), Italy, September 11th-September 16th, 2023. The title this year was "GRAZP: Groups and RIgidity around the Zimmer program", as the workshop focused on the recent proof of Zimmer's conjecture by Brown-Fisher-Hurtado and the plethora of ramifications that this opened.
There were three minicourses, held by David Fisher (Rice University), Mitul Islam (Universität Heidelberg) and Amie Wilkinson (University of Chicago). Each minicourse was complemented by an accompanying talk and the program included shorter talks in the afternoon as well as a session of lighting talks at the beginning of the week.
It was attended by over 120 participants, of which over half of them students or mathematicians at the beginning of their career.
In addition to the support from the Swiss Mathematical Society, the workshop was funded by the Zürich Graduate School in Mathematics, the Forschungsinstitut für Mathematik, the USA National Science Foundation, the Italian GNSAGA, the Department of Mathematics of the Università di Bologna and the Stiftung zur Förderung der mathematischen Wissenschaften in der Schweiz. As for the previous editions, the workshop was an enormous success. It generated already a flurry of activities and lead to many connections and collaborations among the participants.

Week-end des Jeunes Chercheur.ses de l'ARDM
Lausanne, 18 au 20 mai, 2023

Le weekend des jeunes chercheur.ses de l'Association pour la Recherche en Didactique des Mathématiques (ARDM), qui s'est tenu à Lausanne du 18 au 20 mai 2023, a réuni 21 doctorant.es et 4 chercheur.ses invité.es de différents pays (Suisse, France, Italie, Québec).
L'événement a permis aux doctorant.es d'établir une communauté tout en se formant à la recherche lors des conférences, ateliers et discussions qui ont jalonné ces quelques jours.
Les jeunes chercheur.ses ont également pu présenter leur projet dans un environnement bienveillant et obtenir des retours constructifs afin de poursuivre leur travail.

2024
Matematicando festival 2024
Locarno, 23 to 25 May, 2024

The mathematics festival organised by the Department of Education and Learning / University of Teacher Education (SUPSI) brought 220 classes to Locarno, with almost 3,700 pupils in the first two days aimed at schools. There was also a good turnout on Saturday, which was open to the entire population, with around 3,000 people following the shows and workshops offered in the streets of the city. The public was able to take part in more than 50 initiatives, including workshops and shows, designed to bring people of all ages closer to mathematics, through other disciplines and different perspectives.
The final balance of these three days dedicated to mathematics is extremely positive, in quantitative but above all qualitative terms. The fifth edition of Matematicando Festival. A spasso con la matematica per le strade di Locarno will be held in 2026.
Over the coming months, the www.matematicando.supsi.ch platform will be enriched with the didactic sheets relating to the workshops presented during the festival, which teachers will be able to use in their own classroom practice to encourage innovative teaching, centred on workshop approaches and, when possible, interdisciplinary approaches.