"The petition follows months of trepidation about the congress within the math community. “You do not get 1,500 signatures in 10 days without having many, many mathematicians already registering their complaints to their professional societies and to the ICM organizers,” says Ila Varma, a mathematician at the University of Toronto and one of the petition’s co-authors."
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ICM's peak attendance is around four thousand, so 1,500 would-be attendees signing a petition to move the conference in ten days is pretty authoritative.
I'm going to guess that for many signers-- or at least the US ones-- their opposition to the United States and "its unbridled hatred" doesn't extend to not accepting funding from the US taxpayer.
Entry requirements and the overhead of dealing with visa hoops are a perennial problem for international conferences, nothing new-- and presumably a part of why it hasn't been held in the US in recent memory. But the language on this petition is particularly extreme.
There are many researchers who already avoid US conferences. The risk of arbitrary arrest, being denied entry, or general asshattery from border guards who want to snoop through your social media is just too high. The needless and unjustified war against Iran is just the final straw.
This comment is devoid of data. There have been less stoppages and detentions than you can count on one hand of scientists and mathematicians. There are hundreds of thousands classified via various levels of visa. None have been arrested in some unlawful manner, and the onus is on you to define "asshattery" in a way that is defensible. Foreign adversaries have been embedded within the US academic institutions before the Cold War. Just because the current US president is a divisive convicted felon doesn't suddenly mean we shouldn't care about controlling our own borders.
The US (and many nations for that matter) monitor, track, and protect their borders by foreigners and of a group of mathematicians cannot fathom why this may be the case amidst all-time high mistrust, spying, and academic and corporate espionage and then they should've studied harder.
Clearly that one although it is unclear if she really wanted to run him over. That was a sorry event on all sides from the 'professional protesters' who think they can just interfere with police operations without running any risk themselves - the woman's partner screamed 'why did you use real bullets' - to the policeman who, having been dragged along by an illegal several weeks ago was clearly hair-triggered when it comes to vehicular assault.
The lesson to be learned here is that a) protesters should realise that they are bound by the same laws as all others no matter how virtuous they consider their causes to be and that interfering with police operations comes with real risks and b) the combination of such actions by protesters with the experiences police officers have had during encounters with their targets can make them react in ways which it can be assumed they'd normally not have done. Shooting that woman did not reduce the risk for the police officer, at all. It actually increased the risk of damage to him or others because wounded or dead people behind the wheel can turn vehicles into unguided projectiles.
Nobody will care if the conference isn’t held in Philly. Holding it elsewhere will probably make it a little easier and possibly a little cheaper for people to attend. I doubt mathematicians are part of the 1%, so cash and travel hassle should matter. And given today’s Internet, there’s going to be remote attendance which can happen most anywhere.
While it’s still convenient to gather together to discuss a field, it’s not crucial as it was in past times. Easier to do what’s best for the largest number of people.
It's just grandstanding.They are mathematicians not political activists. If they want their organization to slide into irrelevance, getting involved in left wing (or right wing, but with academia it's usually left wing) politics is a great way to do that.
Anyone can be a "political activist". An activist is just an ordinary person who has had enough. Unless you believe the only valid way to influence political discourse is with money.
Sure, anyone can be an activist but it is clear that academia has been turned into an activist training centre. It is also remarkable how these supposedly intelligent people go astray when it comes to the causes they support, from supporting Hamas to defending those who'd throw them off high buildings or putting them against the wall if they got their chance.
Training would imply that it made effective activists, but activism from these quarters tends to alienate outsiders. It's more purity spiral than activism.
Well, no, I don't think training necessarily would make them effective given the context of academic activism. If the whole world would look like a college campus it might but there is such a big disconnect between the real world and academia that even the best trained academic activist ends up doing just what you describe. In some parts of society it has worked though, viz. the rise of the 'DEI' phenomenon driven in part by the infusion of academics into organisations who used their positions to bring in more academics of similar mindset while shunning those who did not subscribe to the desired narrative. Where it used to be said that it did no harm to let those silly students larp revolutionaries because they'd drop all that when they re-entered 'the real world' the truth turned out to be reversed in that they took all that ideological baggage with them into society.
[1] https://jointmathematicsmeetings.org/meetings/national/jmm20...
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ICM's peak attendance is around four thousand, so 1,500 would-be attendees signing a petition to move the conference in ten days is pretty authoritative.
https://theconversation.com/calls-for-a-boycott-of-the-2026-...
Entry requirements and the overhead of dealing with visa hoops are a perennial problem for international conferences, nothing new-- and presumably a part of why it hasn't been held in the US in recent memory. But the language on this petition is particularly extreme.
The US (and many nations for that matter) monitor, track, and protect their borders by foreigners and of a group of mathematicians cannot fathom why this may be the case amidst all-time high mistrust, spying, and academic and corporate espionage and then they should've studied harder.
By the way. "Iran is a bad government" and "I don't want an avoidable, illegal hot war with Iran" can coexist.
The lesson to be learned here is that a) protesters should realise that they are bound by the same laws as all others no matter how virtuous they consider their causes to be and that interfering with police operations comes with real risks and b) the combination of such actions by protesters with the experiences police officers have had during encounters with their targets can make them react in ways which it can be assumed they'd normally not have done. Shooting that woman did not reduce the risk for the police officer, at all. It actually increased the risk of damage to him or others because wounded or dead people behind the wheel can turn vehicles into unguided projectiles.
While it’s still convenient to gather together to discuss a field, it’s not crucial as it was in past times. Easier to do what’s best for the largest number of people.