My two-year term as SIAM President ended on December 31, 2018. It’s been an exciting and enjoyable two years, not least because of the excellent SIAM staff, leadership and other volunteers I’ve worked with.
My blog post Taking Up the SIAM Presidency and my SIAM News article Evolving and Innovating set out some ideas that I wanted to pursue during my two years as president. I will not attempt to review these here, but just list five highlights from the last two years.
- We held the SIAM ADVANCE in April 2018: a two-day strategic planning workshop attended by 25 officers, staff, and other members of the SIAM community. The many ideas that emerged from the event are summarized in an 80-page report provided to the SIAM Council and Board of Trustees. Many of these have already been acted upon, others are in progress, and yet more will be considered in the future. My SIAM News article Advancing SIAM gives more details of the workshop.
- A new journal SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science was created. The first issue will be published in the first few months of 2019.
- A new SIAM book series Data Science was created.
- A new SIAG, the SIAM Activity Group on Applied and Computational Discrete Algorithms was approved and will begin operation in 2019.
- The new SIAM website was launched (in June 2018).
Here is a summary of my presidency in numbers:
- 12 trips to the USA (with 0 upgrades from economy class to business class).
- 8 visits to SIAM headquarters and 1 SIAM staff meeting attended.
- 20 “From the SIAM President” columns written for SIAM News: they are listed here.
- 2 SIAM Council Meetings chaired and 4 SIAM Board meetings attended.
- 1 ICIAM board meeting attended and 1 ICIAM board meeting and workshop hosted by SIAM in Philadelphia.
- 2 meetings of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics in Washington chaired and 2 attended.
- Over 230 appointments made to committees and of candidates for elections (with the advice of various SIAM committees).
Nick Higham 