Reflections of an Associate Secretary

The AMS, founded in 1888 to further the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, advocacy and other programs… Thus begins the mission statement of the Society. Meetings are at the heart of what we do, and Steven Weintraub is a notable figure in the history of the Society, having served as associate secretary of the AMS for two-thirds of this century and as a mentor to all current associate secretaries. These contributions of his are but a part of four decades of faithful and exemplary leadership in the Society: as chair of the Working Group on Public Awareness of Mathematics and of the ECBT Nominating Committee, as representative to the Mathematical Council of the Americas, and as a member of the Council, the Notices Editorial Committee, the Human Rights Committee, the Committee on the Profession, the Nominating Committee of the Council, and the Committee on Publications. He is also an author of AMS articles and books, and few know the Society and our community as well as he does. I am sure that you will enjoy this lively story about AMS meetings and hope that you will feel inspired to become involved as a participant and as an organizer. —Boris Hasselblatt, AMS Secretary

As I write this (in fall 2024), I am finishing up my eighth two-year term as an associate secretary of the AMS (the “Society”), and I will be stepping down from this position when that ends, on January 31, 2025. I have been encouraged to reflect on this position and write down what I would like people to know about it.

Let me begin with two general remarks.

Having served sixteen years as an associate secretary, and before that having served as an at-large member of the Council, as a member (and, for one year, chair) of the Nominating Committee, and on various other AMS committees, it is certainly fair to say that I am an “insider.” But, of course, I wasn’t always. The AMS has over one hundred committees, and we are always looking for volunteers to serve on them. As you may infer from my long service, I think very highly of the Society. I have served in various capacities in my department and university, but I regard my work as an associate secretary to be my principal form of service to the mathematical community. Without false modesty, I can say that I have served the community both long and well. This service has not only been interesting and enjoyable but has been a source of great personal satisfaction for me. So, even (or perhaps especially) if you have had little involvement with the Society up until now, let me strongly encourage you to volunteer. We need you, and you will get a lot out of it.

As an associate secretary, I have worked closely with AMS staff, mostly but not exclusively in the Department of Meetings and Conferences, for many years. One thing you may not be aware of is that the AMS is fortunate to have an almost uniformly excellent staff, who are far more than capable and very dedicated to their work, and I would like to acknowledge their contributions here.

Now to the particulars.

What is the job of an associate secretary? It has nothing to do with taking minutes. Basically, we arrange meetings. The territory of the AMS, which includes the US and Canada, is divided into four sections, and there is an associate secretary for each. (My territory is the eastern section, which includes the northeastern states of the US and the easternmost provinces of Canada.) We hold two sectional meetings a year in each of the sections, one in the spring and one in the fall, and I am responsible for the meetings in my section. Each associate secretary is responsible for the AMS program at the JMM (Joint Mathematics Meetings) once every four years, on a strict rotation. The AMS has an active program of joint international meetings, averaging about once a year, and the four of us take turns handling these, on an informal rotation. The four of us plus the AMS secretary constitute the Secretariat. (The secretary is involved not only with meetings but also with almost all aspects of the Society’s activities and plays a central role in its governance.)

The first step in arranging a sectional meeting is finding a venue. Sectional meetings are held at universities. We are very grateful when math departments volunteer to host sectional meetings, so let me strongly urge you to consider doing so. (This is not the place to discuss the details, but let me say that, while the host institution has to do some work, the bulk of the work is done by the AMS meetings department.) If you’re interested, contact the associate secretary for your section. But most of the time, the associate secretary has to “cold email” department chairs to solicit them to host meetings. Doing so is not only a service to the community but has advantages for host departments as well, including providing opportunities for their faculties and increased visibility in their institutions. We try to line up sites for sectional meetings in year $n$ by year $n-2$. My practice is to make a site visit for each sectional meeting about a year in advance of the meeting in order to nail down the logistics.

There are three Invited Addresses (IAs) at each sectional meeting. Each associate secretary is a member of their Program Committee. The job of the Program Committee in year $n-1$ is to choose the IAs for the sectional meetings in year $n$. I invite host departments to suggest speakers. The program committees make their own judgments, but we always take the host institution’s suggestions very seriously. (There is one AMS Einstein Lecture each year, which is held at a sectional meeting, but that is decided separately.)

The heart of sectional meetings is special sessions. These are proposed by individual mathematicians or groups of mathematicians, with the proposal deadline being six to eight months before the meeting. Special session proposals on any topic within the mathematical sciences are welcome. The relevant associate secretary decides on the acceptance of the proposals and the scheduling of the sessions. The vast majority of proposals for special sessions at sectional meetings are accepted as is, but there are sometimes special cases (which I won’t go into here). A typical sectional meeting will have thirty to forty special sessions.

Once proposals are accepted, organizers are free to invite people to speak in their sessions. The vast majority of speakers in special sessions are there by invitation. However, the sessions are announced in the Notices and on the meeting website, and I always tell organizers to reserve a few spots for people who see the topic and volunteer. (I have given “volunteer” talks at special sessions myself. They were in areas in which I had not previously worked, so the organizers had been unaware of my work there.) The final decisions on acceptance of talks are essentially left up to the organizers. Of course, there is only a finite amount of time available for a session, so there is a limit on the number of talks that can be held per session.

There are contributed paper sessions at sectional meetings as well, and again, anyone is welcome to give a contributed paper talk on any topic in the mathematical sciences.

I have to say that I am always disappointed that only a minority (sometimes a small minority) of participants at sectional meetings attend the IAs. The IAs are plenary, so there are no conflicts. Rather, I think the reason is that, to put it bluntly, we have all suffered through many dreadful talks in the courses of our careers, and people are reluctant to sit through another one. I want to point out that it is the official position of the AMS, and one that I personally agree with and emphasize to my program committees, that the primary consideration in choosing an IA is the quality of the talk. Of course, we want the speaker to have something exciting to report on, but I tell my program committees that a speaker who has proven a great theorem but can’t give a good talk is simply a disservice to the audience. So if you’re a participant at a sectional meeting, I’d encourage you to attend the IAs. You’ll (probably) be pleasantly surprised.

One thing I should point out is that there are deadlines for almost everything associated with meetings, e.g., submitting a proposal for a special session or submitting an abstract for a talk. For many mathematicians, a deadline is a time to start thinking about doing something if you’re not busy doing something else at the time. For the AMS, a deadline is a deadline. And many mathematicians think that there is a law against getting things done in advance of a deadline. Believe it or not, this is false! Indeed, whatever the actual deadlines are, I strongly encourage people to get things in early for our sake—it’s a big help to us—as well as yours. For example, people are generally invited to speak in special sessions months in advance of the deadline. If you wait until the deadline day to submit your abstract for the meeting and, for example, you wind up traveling during that day or your internet connection goes down, you should frankly not expect much sympathy from me, and we will not let you submit late. (If you have a plane to catch, you leave for the airport with just enough time to make it, you are delayed by a traffic jam, and you get to the airport late, the airline is not going to hold the flight for you. Well, neither will we.)

In principle, the job of an associate secretary in organizing the JMM is pretty much the same as in organizing a sectional meeting, but in practice it is much different. First of all, it is literally an order of magnitude more work.

The JMM is, as its website says, “the largest mathematics gathering in the world.” It is a huge convention, with over 6,000 participants in each of the past few years. Site selection is handled by the AMS meetings department and is done several years in advance. (Technically speaking, the Secretariat approves the dates and places of all AMS meetings, but if we were ever to turn down the meetings department’s recommendations for the JMM, I’m sure there would be a huge explosion.) The meetings department handles all the logistics, while the associate secretary is responsible for the mathematical program. (The associate secretary participates in the site visit, as it is important for them to be familiar with the lay of the land when it comes time to schedule the program.)

Once again, individual mathematicians or groups of mathematicians submit proposals for special sessions (by the proposal deadline, of course). But for the JMM, we always receive far more proposals than we can accommodate. Thus the associate secretary must make difficult decisions about which proposals to accept and how much time to allot to each accepted session. There is also a huge combinatorial game the associate secretary must play in order to arrange the schedule so as to minimize conflicts between related sessions. (It is almost never the case that organizers get as much time as they want—there are simply never enough meeting rooms to go around. The goal is to minimize, not eliminate, conflicts, as elimination of all conflicts is simply not possible given the volume of proposals and the limited time and space available for sessions.)

Additionally, there are contributed paper sessions at the JMM. While these sessions at sectional meetings are invariably small, there are always a very large number of contributed paper abstracts submitted to the JMM. The AMS policy is that we accept all reasonable contributed paper abstracts. The associate secretary must go through all the submitted abstracts to weed out the few that are unreasonable. Over the years, I have rejected numerous easy proofs of Fermat’s Last Theorem, both proofs and disproofs of the Riemann Hypothesis, as well as abstracts that, as far as I could tell, were complete gobbledygook. And then the associate secretary must schedule all the contributed papers.

(To be precise, there is a committee that helps with the special sessions and the contributed papers. But the associate secretary does the bulk of the work and makes the final decisions about these.)

The associate secretary is also a member of the committee that decides on the AMS IAs at the JMM. This does not include all AMS-sponsored addresses at the JMM, as some are chosen by other committees (e.g., the Colloquium and Gibbs lecturers), but the associate secretary schedules all the AMS-sponsored talks.

For AMS joint international meetings, the relevant associate secretary is involved in determining the program but is not involved with the logistics, as we leave those to the host societies.

In addition, the secretary and the associate secretaries are officers of the Society and hence ex officio members of the Council, the governing body of the Society. As such, they have a say in just about all AMS policies. The Secretariat and the Council each meet in person twice a year, with one of those meetings occurring at the JMM.

The members of the Secretariat all work well together, and I have found my colleagues on the Secretariat to be a friendly and congenial group of people. And I must say that the three secretaries I have served under—Bob Daverman, Carla Savage, and Boris Hasselblatt—have all been outstanding in that position.

We associate secretaries are expected to attend all the meetings we organize, both domestic and foreign. In the course of my tenure, I have traveled to international meetings in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Pucon, Chile; Alba Iulia, Romania; and Shanghai, China. And I will be traveling to Auckland, New Zealand, in December 2024 to the last meeting I will be organizing. We are, of course, reimbursed for our expenses, so this foreign travel is, admittedly, a perk of the position. The AMS used to hold Council and committee meetings at the O’Hare Hilton; I am a private pilot, and over the years, this gave me the chance to fly my plane into O’Hare airport a dozen times, which was always a trip (so to speak).

I received my PhD in 1974 and retired from teaching at the end of the past spring semester, after an even half century as a professor of mathematics. I said to my colleagues on the last day of classes last May, “It’s been a good run.” My sixteen years as associate secretary have been a good run, too.