[cmath] ICME-11

[Peter Taylor]

I have just returned from ICME-11 in Monterrey Mexico.  It was a huge 
conference with between 3000 and 4000 delegates from almost all of 
the 84 member countries.  I didn't get an accurate count of the 
number of Canadians but I encountered no less than 30.  Many of these 
took part in the program, either in topic or discussion groups, and 
we had three regular lecturers, Carolyn Kieran, Louise Poirier, and 
Christiane Rousseau.

I attended the meeting of the General Assembly on the day before the 
conference opened.  This is essentially the governing body of ICMI 
and it consists of the representatives from each country plus the 13 
members of the Executive Committee.  One of the main items of 
business was the election of the new Executive Committee to serve for 
three years from January 1, 2010 till end of 2012.  This was an 
historic election in that it was the first time it was elected by the 
ICMI GA, rather than by IMU.  The results are:

PRESIDENT:
William (Bill) Barton (New Zealand)
SECRETARY-GENERAL:
Jaime Carvalho e Silva (Portugal)
VICE-PRESIDENTS:
Mina Teicher (Israel)
Angel Ruiz (Costa Rica)
MEMBERS AT LARGE:
Mariolina Bartolini Bussi (Italy)
Sung Je Cho (Korea)
Roger Howe (USA)
Renuka Vithal (South Africa)
Zhang Yingbo (China)

In particular note that Bernard Hodgson will step down as ICMI 
Secretary-General at the start of 2010.  This completes a mammoth 
11-year term for Bernard, a period in which Canada gained a prominent 
position on the ICMI map.  .

At the meeting a number of current issues were discussed, Committee 
reports were received as well as reports from current or upcoming 
ICMI studies, a few countries gave presentations (this year it was 
France, Korea, South Africa and USA).  Reports on most of these 
happenings will appear in the ICMI newsletter, but I will mention a 
few that struck me.  By the way if you do not receive the online ICMI 
newsletter and would like to, visit:
<http://www.mathunion.org/mailman/listinfo/icmi-news>http://www.mathunion.org/mailman/listinfo/icmi-news
and sign up.

1.  Efforts are being made to have more math education journals in 
the Citation Index, as the CI now seems to commonly used in the 
calculation of research impact factors.
2.  There was discussion of the continued financial health of ICMI 
which currently loses about $7000 per year.  One idea was to exact 
dues for participation in the General Assembly from non-member countries.
3. Another significant issue involved the promotion of mathematics 
education in developing countries.  This is a joint enterprise with IMU.
4.  Another joint IMU/ICMI undertaking is the "Pipeline Project" 
concerned with issues around the supply and demand in teaching and 
the workplace for graduates of mathematics programs.  In recent years 
IMU raised the concern of declining numbers of students choosing to 
pursue mathematics at the university level.  This seems to be a 
world-wide trend over the past decade, and is a concern to a wide 
range of professionals, not only mathematicians.  A related problem, 
of course, is the inadequate supply of qualified students entering 
mathematics teacher programs.  IMU enlisted ICMI to help them gather 
data, so that at the beginning we have some idea of the real 
dimension and locus of the problem.  Such data has proved hard to 
gather and it has been decided to mount an extensive study of 6 
countries: Australia, Finland, France, New Zealand, Portugal and USA.
I'm happy to answer any questions.
peter

Peter Taylor
Professor , Department of Math & Stats
Queen's University.
Kingston, ON  K7L 3N6
(613) 533 2434
peter.taylor at queensu.ca
http://www.mast.queensu.ca/~peter/
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