CMS 2021 Winter Meeting Report
Happy New Year to all! 600 mathematicians were welcomed to the online platform for the 2021 CMS Winter Meeting from December 2-7. This was the fourth online meeting the CMS has hosted. Participants attended over 30 scientific sessions; four plenary lectures; two prize lectures and one public lecture over the course of the meeting. The plenary lecturers were Richard Hoshino (Northeastern University); Doina Precup (McGilll University); Rediet Abebe (University of California Berkeley and Dimitris Koukoulopoulos (University of Montreal)
CMS continued to offer three-hour mini courses, which took place on Thursday, December 2. There were three mini courses offered, which included: a free course for an Introduction to Programming in Maple; and two courses: an introduction to self-similarity and an introduction of modelling for infectious diseases with vaccination
At the end of Thursday, CMS hosted a Public Lecture featuring Caroline Colijn (Simon Fraser University) who gave a talk titled: Mathematics and the pandemic: from populations to individuals
The official conference opened on Friday afternoon with an opening and welcome given by CMS President, Javad Mashreghi.
The CMS Student Committee (STUDC) hosted a student social giving students a chance to network and interact in a non-academic setting in a relaxed atmosphere buoyed by icebreaker activities. Mathematically themed games were also played.
The meeting also included a panel discussion on Tuesday, December 7, which was organized by Nicholas Fillion and Martiza Branker. The panel discussion was focused on some snapshots of Women in Mathematical History.
During the 2021 Winter Meeting, attendees were able to network with peers and like-minded individuals on the online community boards and in our networking sessions.
The customary awards banquet was not possible,, but the CMS recognized our 2021 prize winners during the opening remarks and prize winners also prepared a lecture. Those recipients include: Joseph Khoury (University of Ottawa) recipient of the Adrien-Pouliot Prize, Luke Postle (University of Waterloo) recipient of the Coxeter-James Prize who gave a lecture on On Hadwiger’s Conjecture, Christopher Liaw (University of Toronto) recipient of the CMS Blair Spearman Doctoral Prize who gave a lecture on Optimal anytime regret with two experts, and Kseniya Garashuk (University of the Fraser Valley) recipient of the Graham Wright Award.
The AARMS – CMS Student Poster Awards were also presented during the online event. The winners were AARMS Prize: Benoit Corsini (McGill University) with Local minimum spanning tree optimization; CMS Student Committee Prize: Tian Wang (University of Illinois Chicago) with On the Effective Version of Serre’s Open Image Theorem; and CMS President’s Prize: Gavin Orok (Waterloo University) with Patterns in Higher-Dimensional Electron Domain Geometries
Putting on such a meeting requires much dedication and hard work and would not be possible without the efforts of the Scientific Organizing Committee, the Scientific Directors, the Session Organizers, and the CMS staff. The Scientific Directors, Nils Bruin (Simon Fraser University), and Nilima Nigam (Simon Fraser University) worked tirelessly on a large scientific program. Their dedication and flexibility helped to make this 2021 Winter Meeting one to remember.
The CMS would like to acknowledge financial support from MITACS, PIMS, FIELDS, CRM, AARMS, and MapleSoft.
