Raising Public Awareness Committee of the European Mathematical Society

• Chair

Roberto Natalini is the Director of the Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo “Mauro Picone”of the Italian CNR. His research themes concerns: fluid dynamics, road traffic, chemical damage of monuments, biomathematics. He coordinates the public awareness site MaddMaths! and is the director of Archimede, the oldest Italian journal devoted to popularization of Mathematics. From 2015, he is Chair of the Raising Public Awareness of the European Mathematical Society.

• Vice Chair

Franka Miriam Brueckler is an assistant professor at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Zagreb (Croatia). She is active in popularisation of mathematics since 1998. and was awarded with the State prize for popularisation of science in Croatia for 2009. She has published over a hundred of popular articles and two popular maths books, held more than 50 public talks on maths, conducted about 100 workshops for different types of audience, and also contributed to maths popularisation by activities in street maths, appearances in television and radio, design of announcements and illustrations, … Besides popularisation of mathematics and the sciences, her main interests are history of mathematics, maths education and applications of mathematics in chemistry.

• Members

Betül Tanbay is a professor of mathematics at the Bogaziçi University in Istanbul, working in Operator Algebras. She is the founder of the Istanbul Center for Mathematical Sciences and the first woman president of the Turkish Mathematical Society.

Sylvie Benzoni-Gavage is a professor of mathematics at the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, in France, and the head of the Institut Camille Jordan. Her main research interests concern hyperbolic partial differential equations, surface waves, dispersive hydrodynamics, phase transitions and traffic flow. She used to be in charge of the press review for the French website Images des mathématiques, and was involved in the executive committee of the blog mpt2013.fr in connection with the Mathematics of Planet Earth initiative.

Andreas Daniel Matt works at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach. He studied mathematics and computer science and did his PhD in mathematics in machine learning at the University of Innsbruck and the University of Buenos Aires. Since 2007, he coordinates the project IMAGINARY, an international platform for open and interactive mathematics communication. He also curated the MiMa, museum for minerals and mathematics in Oberwolfach.

Krzysztof Ciesielski Krzysztof Ciesielski works in the Mathematics Institute of the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, where in 1999-2008 he was a vice-Head responsible for teaching. His main mathematical interest is topological dynamics. He has been a Correspondent for “The Mathematical Intelligencer” since 1987. He is an author of more than 200 articles and a few books presenting mathematics for general public (mostly written together with his friend, Zdzislaw Pogoda). For these books they have been given several prestigeous awards, including Great Dickstein Prize of the Polish Mathematical Society and Steinhaus Prize for popularizing science. In 1999-2008 he was an Associate Editor of European Mathematical Society Newsletter. Since 2012 he has been an Associate Editor of “Wiadomosci Matematyczne”, journal of the Polish Mathematical Society.

Maria Dedò has been full professor of Geometry until 2014. Her research interests range from low-dimensional geometry and topology to problems related to communication and informal learning of mathematics. In particular, she was one of the promoters of the centre “matematita” (a Research Centre for the Communication and the Informal Learning of Mathematics) and of the recent exhibition “mateinitaly”.

Steve Humble MBE works at Newcastle University, UK. His research focuses on talented children in low-income areas of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania and their possible contribution to the eradication of poverty. He is a Member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS) Committee for Raising the Public Awareness of Mathematics in Europe, a fellow of The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) and delivers “Maths Master Classes” for the Royal Institution. To promote public interest in mathematics he wrote fortnightly newspaper columns for eight years as ‘DrMaths’. He also has written a range of puzzles ‘explorer’ books and a number of classroom resources. Humble’s new book “How to be Inventive when teaching Primary Maths” has just been published by Routledge (2015) and was Routledge education author of the month March 2015. He is editor with Dixon on the “Handbook of International Development and Education” (2015) and editor for “50 Visions of Mathematics” (2014) from OUP. He holds the Guinness World Record for 1001 children on a ‘Maths Walk’. Humble was the Director of the British “Numbers Festival” at Newcastle University, which took place in the summer 2015. He was awarded an MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for his services to Education in the 2016 New Year’s Honours List. Find out more about Dr Maths.

Michel Rigo is full professor, Math. Department of the University of Liège, Belgium. His research interests concern: combinatorics, numeration systems, combinatorial games and theoretical computer science. Since 2007, he works actively to popularize mathematics giving hundreds of talks in high schools. He was awarded the Wernaers prize in 2010 for “dissemination of knowledge”. Since 2012, he is the academic supervisor of the local cell ‘RéjouiSciences’ from the University of Liège in charge of the organization of various events for the promotion of STEM for a general audience.

• Responsible Member for Executive Committee of the EMS

Martin Raussen is a vice-president of the European Mathematical Society; he cares for good contacts between the RPA-committee and the executive committee of the EMS. In the period 2003-08, he was the editor-in-chief of the society’s Newsletter. Martin is a professor of mathematics with special responsibilities at Aalborg University in Denmark. He is an algebraic topologist who has specialized to work on the interface between topology and concurrency theory in theoretical computer science. He has been chairman of the European Science Foundation Research Networking Programme Applied and Computational Algebraic Topology.

• Past Members (but still active)

Ehrhard Behrends works as a professor for mathematics at Freie Universität Berlin. His fields of interest are functional analysis and stochastics. He has realized public awareness projects since many years. E. g., the web sites mathematik.de and www.mathematics-in-europe.eu were initiated by him. His column “Fünf Minuten Mathematik” in the German newspaper “DIE WELT” was later published as a book. It has been translated to eight foreign languages.