HELP WANTED!
Back in 2011, the CMS Notes started a new column, entitled “Research Notes.” It was suggested and originally edited by the late and much-missed Florian Diacu, and ran for about eight years. In 2019 a new editor was needed, and nobody stepped forward. It seems very likely that we’d have found somebody soon if it weren’t for the COVID-19 pandemic, which threw everybody’s schedule into chaos. But momentum was lost, and for the past six years we haven’t had that column.
And that’s a pity. I always found it fascinating reading, and I’m sure others did too. In each issue, somebody wrote a page or two about their particular research area, or about some particularly interesting topic within it. Contributors tried to write in a way accessible to other mathematicians, but also to give a reasonably solid description: in many issues, the column provided ninety percent of the LaTeX equation environments that we used! This month my question is—can we go back and do it again?
What we need is a good editor, prepared to put in a certain amount of time on the column. My recollection is that while (from what I heard) some articles required a certain amount of back-and-forth between the author and the Research Notes editor, most were submitted in a close-to-ready form: after all, our members are used to writing articles. I would assume, then, that most of the job of a Research Notes editor would involve chasing down articles, either directly (“Hey, Sandy, can you write me a piece for the Research Notes about that stuff you’re doing with metaquaternions?”) or indirectly (“Hey, Maxime, who’s doing interesting research in your department? Think they’d have time to write me a piece for the Research Notes?”) A promising source could be people who’ve given interesting talks at colloquia or CMS meetings.
Now, some people are high-degree nodes in the human graph, or members of large departments, and will have no difficulty getting a paper from an operator theorist for one issue and an applied statistician for the next. If you are interested in the position but not sure that you have quite enough contacts, perhaps you could get together an editorial team of two or three colleagues with varied interests — not necessarily all form the same university, This job seems perfect for parallel processing, needing just enough communication to ensure that people aren’t getting asked three times.
If you think this is something that you might like to do – basically sending off a few emails per month – please read the ad on page ?? and respond to it. Thanks!
