лист Президента Європейського математичного товариства

Дата публікації допису: 12 черв. 2019 13:15:24

Dear colleagues,

As president of the European Mathematical Society (EMS) I would like point out a very urgent and unfavourable situation for the funding of mathematics in Europe.The European Research Council (ERC) budget for each discipline is allocated each year in proportion to the number of proposals and the requested budget received. It has been observed that, since the founding of the ERC, the budget for mathematics in the three funding streams (advanced, consolidator, and starting grants) has dropped to almost half, because there are not enough applications.

There may be several reasons for this decline in applications, e.g. low acceptance rate, the feeling that certain subfields of mathematics have small chances, or the fact that for interdisciplinary research of mathematics with other sciences it is difficult to get funding. Also in mathematics there are often complaints that the maximal possible budgets are too large.

All this is partially right, but not submitting applications leads to a vicious cycle, and further decline of mathematics funding. How can we counteract this unfortunate development. First of all, there is no reason to apply for the full possible budget if this is not appropriate for a research project, smaller proposals are very welcome, and second we mathematicians should be more self confident in writing proposals. It is not a waisted time, even one is not funded. In several European countries there is even ffinancial support for proposals that make it to the second round but do not get funded due to budget restrictions.

It is very important that applications are encouraged throughout the mathematical community and the EMS is planning to create an initiative to support applicants..

So please distribute this information within your community.

Volker Mehrmann