MacTutor logo MacTutor

BMC Scientific Committee, June 2024

Minutes for the meeting of BMC Scientific Committee, Wednesday 19th June 2024, from 1300, at Manchester BMC

  1. Attendance The meeting was attended by
    (Outgoing) Chair: Sarah Rees (Newcastle)
    (Incoming) Chair: Jan Grabowski (Lancaster)
    LMS reps: Jesus Martinez-Garcia (Essex), Jason Lotay (Oxford) EMS rep: Scott Harper (covering for Sophie Huczynska, St Andrews) Manchester 2024: Charles Eaton
    Exeter 2025: Mark Holland
    Cardiff 2026: Timothy Logvinenko
    Ex officio: Simon Edwards (LMS Executive Secretary), Nicola Goldie (covering for Elizabeth Fisher)
    Simon Edwards and Nicola Goldie arrived a little late, since there were problems with their train.
  2. Introduction
    All members of the committee were present or represented. Sarah welcomed the two new LMS reps and explained how the committee works. Jan Grabowski would take over the Chair at the end of this committee meeting.
  3. Minutes of last Scientific Committee meeting
    The minutes of the last meeting, which had been held by zoom on 9th October 2023, were approved. Sarah agreed to send those to Jesus and Jason.
  4. Immediate impressions on the 2024 BMC
    It was agreed by all that the BMC was going very well.
    Charles Eaton reported briefly; a full report will be on the agenda for the meeting in the autumn. He noted that while he was the only organiser at this meeting, the BMC had been organised by a group of four, consisting of Charles, Donald Robertson, Omar Leon Sanchez and Gareth Jones.
    The meeting was running comfortably within its budget, with income of around £19K from registration of 255 participants, £15K from the LMS, £1500 from INI and ICMS, £9K from Heilbronn, £3K from a publisher (in exchange for an agreement that their editors, who met at the end of the BMC, would not be charged registration), £2.8K from the Manchester Institute for the Mathematical Sciences. Support from the Clay Institute is not included within this budget, since Clay covered expenses directly.
    Local postgraduate participants who registered early enough to qualify for the early-bird rate were registered in a block and had their registrations refunded.
    The University was charging around £10K for room hire, but that was covered by a grant from the Mathematics Department.
    The bill for catering (of lunches, the pizza party on Wednesday evening, and the reception on Monday evening) would be around £20K. Cost of the reception was covered by funds from ICMS and INI.
    £2K had been assigned for each of seven workshops, with a suggested cap of £350 for expenses of each of the six invited speakers. Apart from that financial direction, workshop organisers were given significant freedom; but they had been asked to submit lists of their invited speakers in advance. In addition to invited speakers the workshops incorporated contributed talks, which were intended to be informal, and for these workshop organisers were given complete freedom. Workshop speakers were obliged to pay registration fees themselves.
    The six plenary and 12 morning speakers had been invited two years in advance. The plenary speakers were funded directly by the Clay Institute, but were selected by the Manchester committee, without any intervention by the Clay Institute. Those speakers' expenses were not included within the budget. The morning speakers' expenses were taken from the budget, supplemented by income from personal grants; accommodation for those speakers totalling around £3K was charged to the budget.
    The public lecture by Katie Steckles had had to be postponed, after students had occupied the space outside the proposed venue, making it very difficult to hold an event with significant outside participation by young people. The event would be rescheduled in the autumn. Simon Edwards offered help from the LMS for the rescheduled event. Jan suggested that the event might be run as a hybrid event, to allow BMC participants to attend part remotely.
  5. Report on plans for Exeter B(A)MC
    The Exeter B(A)MC would run from the morning of Monday 23rd June 2025 to midday on Thursday 26th June 2025, and would be a joint BMC/BAMC event. Numbers of 150-200 were expected for BMC, 300-350 for BAMC. It would be run as an in-person event, thought there might also be some on-line activity, if that seemed appropriate. There would be no charges for rooms from the University. All rooms would be booked across BMC/BAMC.
    Exeter has an internal events team, and this team would organise all the catering. Accommodation for particpants would be on campus. It was not yet clear where the dinner would be, whether it would be on or off campus; it would be on the Wednesday.
    There would be six plenary talks, across BMC/BAMC, one of which would be the LMS lecture, and a public lecture. The public lecture would be on Tuesday or Wednesday and might involve the Met Office. There would be 10 morning talks on the BMC side.
    There would be a poster session, maybe minisymposia (as was standard at the BAMC), possibly a panel discussion. On the BMC side there would be six workshops as there had been at Manchester.
    It was expected that the website would be live from September, that registration would open in November or December.
    NB: A slide presented at the AGM later on the day of this meeting announced details of plenary speakers etc.
  6. Future BMCs
    We have already agreed on Cardiff 2026 (Timothy Logvinenko), Birmingham 2027 (Chris Parker), and are in discussion with Warwick about a joint BMC/BAMC event in 2030.
  7. Any other business
    There was no other business.
Sarah Rees 19th June 2024.