How to Throw a Math Party for 500 People

In April 2023, 564 people flocked to the University of Cincinnati (UC) to immerse themselves in math at the American Mathematical Society’s spring meeting for the central section.

They represented 42 US states and the District of Columbia. Other guests traveled from Canada (seven), Japan (three), and Haiti, Mexico, and Sweden (one each).

“I heard from so many participants, many of whom hadn’t traveled much in recent years, how important this opportunity to reconnect with colleagues was,” said AMS Associate Secretary for the Central Section Betsy Stovall, professor of mathematics, University of Wisconsin-Madison. As one of four AMS associate secretaries, Stovall plans two sectional meetings per year.

During two weekend days, 468 speakers presented 481 abstracts. Thirty special sessions were composed of 102 sub-sessions. Two contributed paper sessions were held, and four invited addresses took place.

“As a conference host, I’m just in shock at how much went on in the span of a single weekend,” said Michael Goldberg, UC math department chair and professor. “Then again, I’ve never thrown a party for 500 people before.”

“Fantastic weekend indeed,” said Eyvindur Ari Palsson, associate professor of mathematics at Virginia Tech, who organized a special session and presented research in Cincinnati.

We asked Palsson, Stovall, Goldberg, and other behind-the-scenes players for their advice to prospective hosts of sectional meetings. Here’s what they had to say.

Plan Ahead

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, UC waited four years to host the spring sectional meeting it had begun to organize in 2019.

“Typically, the AMS chooses a location for its meetings about 18 months to two years in advance. In our case we arranged in 2019 to hold the 2021 Spring Central Sectional meeting at the University of Cincinnati,” Goldberg said.

About one year in advance, the AMS visits a meeting location to confirm the suitability of the configuration of classrooms, auditoriums, public space, and facilities. Stovall and her checklist got plans moving.

“I have a questionnaire that I go through with the local organizers,” the associate secretary said. “This helps them think about what reservations and other advance planning they might need to do ahead of time—for instance, to ensure accessible facilities. And it also helps the AMS communicate to all of the meeting participants what facilities are available, what to expect in terms of A/V equipment, etc.”

“I’d really encourage departments that are considering hosting a sectional to go for it, because they bring a lot to the mathematical community and give the department a chance to shape that,” Stovall said. A sectional meeting “brings a great deal of scientific activity to the host department and creates opportunities for local mathematicians to organize sessions, give talks, and attend talks without having to travel,” she said.

“I think these meetings can seem really daunting for departments because of the scale, but the AMS meetings staff is able to provide a lot of logistical assistance, and the model of having lots of special sessions means the work is more distributed than at a regular conference,” Stovall added.

Palsson and Krystal Taylor of Ohio State University, friends since graduate school, assembled the AMS Special Session “Interface of Geometric Measure Theory and Harmonic Analysis” in seven months. Creating the special session was a natural progression after Taylor, associate professor of mathematics, was selected to deliver an invited address.

First, Taylor and Palsson brainstormed the precise theme and title of the session. “Once this was decided, we identified and reached out to potential speakers related to this theme with an emphasis on highlighting a diverse group of speakers from a range of institutions and career stages,” Palsson said.

“Speakers who accepted submitted their talk title and abstract in February. Once we knew the precise topics, we organized the schedule accordingly, to group thematic areas,” he said.

“Eyvi put together a list of old friends combined with many new faces,” Taylor said. “He mixed in some unexpected names from tangential areas, but people catered their talks to the name of the session and the crowd so it really worked.”

Stovall agreed. “This session was at the interface of a few different areas—harmonic analysis, combinatorics, and geometric measure theory—and, as such, brings together people who might not normally go to the same conferences,” she said. “It also had a great mix of early-career researchers and those who are further along in their careers.”

Considering your own special session? “I’d encourage potential organizers to go for it and just submit a session proposal,” Stovall said. “I especially encourage organizers to plan ahead for a diverse lineup of speakers, along many axes, and to think about including both familiar faces and also those who might not be invited so frequently to speak.”

Form a Team

“The AMS has a detailed checklist of what needs to be in place for a sectional meeting,” Goldberg said. “My role has been to connect the dots between what’s on that checklist and what resources—locations, people, services—are available on our campus.”

Math department business manager Nancy Diemler spearheaded logistics. A sign on Diemler’s office door reads “UC Mental Health Champion,” which means she has trained in methods to support student, faculty, and staff mental health. Diemler proved to be invaluable during the sectional, from managing student workers to coordinating camera crews, dining with luminaries to clearing classrooms of forgotten items after the meeting (because someone had to). That weekend, she made sure to have available 50 gallons of regular coffee, eight gallons of decaf coffee, and five gallons of hot water for tea.

UC Math Professor Robert Buckingham, whose research focuses on the asymptotic analysis of problems from probability and differential equations, took the lead on fundraising and managing the budget for the meeting. The team pitched in to publicize the meeting in the math department and around the university, advertising the AMS Einstein Public Lecture to the broader community.

During the meeting, Goldberg said he hoped “to be just another one of the 500 participants, talking and listening to people at the forefront of mathematical research.” But if anything came up, Diemler had him on speed-dial.

Have a Plan B

Nathaniel Whitaker, interim dean of the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, arrived in Cincinnati the day before he was to deliver the Einstein Public Lecture.

That was the only part of his day’s travel plan to be executed seamlessly.

Flights were delayed. Changing planes in Detroit might have stranded Whitaker, a numerical analyst who develops algorithms to solve physical and biological problems described by differential equations.

Upon learning that his midday connecting flight was canceled, Whitaker decided to rent a car and drive the four hours from Detroit to Cincinnati. He arrived an hour before his dinner reservation, tired, but cheerful and unflapped.

Flexibility is key, Palsson said. “We had a speaker whose flight was canceled, so they didn’t make it to Cincinnati until after their talk, but due to cancellations from other speakers, we were able to fit in the latecomer later in the day.”

That was Brian McDonald of the University of Rochester, who presented his 8:30 a.m. paper, “Paths and cycles in distance graphs over finite fields,” at 4:30 p.m. No one in the classroom appeared troubled by this rearrangement.

Clone Yourself?

“Needing to be several places at once is a big part of the AMS meeting experience,” Goldberg observed.

“Besides the special session I was involved with organizing, there were somewhere between three and six others I would have enjoyed attending at the same time. In fact, one of my co-organizers had to duck out for a while so he could go present a talk in another session,” the UC math chair said. “I presented a talk in another session too, but by some miracle there wasn’t a time conflict.”

Palsson and Taylor suggested sharing the workload of session organizing. “It would have been easier if we had just one or two more organizers,” Taylor said. “I was running back and forth to pump for my baby and to attend some other sessions, and a lot of responsibility fell on Eyvi’s shoulders.”

“As a participant, the meeting was wildly successful, but too short to do everything,” Goldberg said. “There were a few hiccups as always—one speaker had to cancel due to a missed flight connection, the room A/V liked some input types better than others—but the show went on as it’s supposed to.”

During two days in April, Goldberg accomplished quite a bit. He met with several collaborators he hadn’t seen in person for a long time, to plan out their next research projects. He caught up with a friend he hadn’t seen in 20 years.

He met a potential future collaborator, who had developed an entirely new tool kit for solving some research problems where Goldberg has always gotten stuck.

He also attended “about a dozen and a half talks” covering different research topics in analysis and differential equations. Goldberg attended plenary talks and learned about connections between numerical analysis and algebraic topology which he “never would have suspected.”

And he presented a talk on his favorite research problem and was asked a lot of good questions: “most of which,” Goldberg said, “I can’t completely answer. Yet.”