ICME14 Day 1

The first day of ICME14 was a short one - lasting from 1:30PM to 5PM (local time in Norway). It consisted of the opening ceremony and a plenary lecture by Cédric Villani.

Needless to say, attending an opening ceremony is a bit different when you have travelled to another continent, are adjusting to a new time zone, and can congratulate yourself that you have been able to find your way around the conference area. At least you have found the room that is easiest to find: the place for the plenaries. As these often have a capacity of thousands of people, you may get the feeling of attending something important. At my first ICME, there was even an address from the US President at the time, Bill Clinton - quite surprisingly, as the conference was in Japan and had little to do with the US. (The address was on video, of course.) The sense of fulfillment in finding my office-at-home and managing to log in to the conference platform is not comparable.

The opening ceremony followed the usual format, including the mentioning of individuals and organizations that have been important in getting the conference in place, information about the city (Shanghai) and the conference, well-chosen words on the importance of mathematics and mathematics education as well as the awarding of prizes. To me, who is neither a native English or Mandarin speaker, having the English sound overlaid with simultaneous translation into Mandarin, made it rather difficult to follow what was said Some of the addresses were subtitled, however, and I did, for instance, notice that more than 120 countries are represented in ICME this year. Towards the end of the opening ceremony, more than 15000 viewers were logged on, which is surely a new record (and also probably was a reason for some transmission interruptions).

Two of the ICME awards, the Felix Klein award and the Hans Freudenthal award, are biannual, thus this year there was both the 2017 and 2019 awards to celebrate. The Emma Castelnuovo award is just awarded every four year. For more on the awards, see ICMI website. The winners were: 

2017 Felix Klein award: Deborah Ball

2017 Hans Freudenthal award: Terezinha Nunes

2019 Felix Klein award: Tommy Dreyfus

2019 Hans Freudenthal award: Gert Schubring

2020 Emma Castelnuovo award: NCTM (USA's National Council for Teachers of Mathematics)

These are all well known names for the mathematics education community. Personally, I've perhaps had most to do with the work of Gert Schubring, who has been so important in strengthening history of mathematics education as a research field. Of course, Deborah Ball are famous for the Mathematical Knowledge of Teaching oval, but has since moved on to other (and more fertile) grounds - on the moment-to-moment dilemmas teachers face in classrooms. Therezina Nunes and Tommy Dreyfus are important names that I have not personally been as occupied with. Nunes is of course co-author of "Street Mathematics", and have later worked further on mathematical thinking. Tommy Dreyfus has for instance worked on AIC, abstration in context. NCTM, of course, has had huge influence in the US, as well as internationally, through their journals, guidelines for teaching and many other publications.

It is nice to hear how these important figures in mathematics education are pointing out the importance of teamwork - new findings in mathematics education are rarely the product of an individual mind.

The opening ceremony finished about 30 minutes late, and then we moved almost straight on to the first plenary lecture of ICME14: Cédric Villani on "Mathematics in the Society" (which is a promising title, given that I will be going to the Mathematics Education and Society conference for the first time this autumn). Villani is a mathematician (Fields medalist!) and a member of the French parliament. He started by saying that he went to a television show to talk about the essence of mathematics, and he brought three objects: Euclid's Elements, a gömböc and a smartphone. In this way he brought forward how mathematics is about reasoning, but at the other hand has wonderful applications. Mathematics is both beautiful and useful. Also, mathematicians bring progress by introducing new ideas and looking at things from another viewpoint. Also, he talked about the connection between new problems and new concepts: new problems lead us to find new concepts to solve them, but new concepts give rise to new problems.

In mathematics, you are not obliged to believe the teacher: you can find errors in what the teacher is saying, and if the teacher is a good one, the teacher will be convinced of the reasoning if you are right. This does not work in the same way in other sciences. He claimed that the three most important parts of mathematics work is tenacity, imagination and rigour (with rigour third).

He talked, inspiringly, about the work he has done after his Fields medal, including a book about what it is to be a mathematician, a comic book and a photo book. Towards the end of his talk, he discussed his work as a politician (in the Scientific Parliamentary Office - I wonder how many other countries have them...) and on AI. He ended by saying how important it is to remember the past and learn from the past, which is a welcome message.

Of course, this was (as usual) just some of the points that I liked and managed to write down, it is not meant to be a full discussion of the lecture, which was, by the way, entertaining and lively, although it was a bit unusual, as it took the form of a autobiography more than a classical plenary lecture.