Michael CowlingI spent two days last week at the Board
meeting of FASTS (the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies), representing the Mathematical Sciences. This was an interesting meeting, buta little depressing. It is clear that someof the problems which beset our discipline
are felt across many other disciplines. TheFASTS Board spent quite a bit of time discussing ways in which professional societies(such as the AustMS) might attract moremembers, and ways in which postgraduate degrees might be made more relevant.
There seemed to be a feeling that the sciences are no longer seen as being able tooffer interesting and worthwhile careers toyoung people. I hope that the forthcoming review of the mathematical sciences willshed some light on ways in which we can attract more students into our profession. But
the future of the AustMS is in our hands,
and we cannot expect the review to offer us
clues to the future.
I am interested in knowing the viewsof the Gazette readers on how the Society
might make itself more attractive to potential members. The FASTS discussions focussed on benefits we might be able to offer, and the consensus seemed to be thatpublishing journals and running conferences
is no longer enough. Certainly the editorsof our journals report that very few Australian mathematicians submit papers, andthis suggests that we are loosing the battle to stay relevant there. Arguably this isdue to our Science Citation Index impact
factors, which are not as high as we would
like them to be, but there is a vicious circle here, and I must exhort (once again)

members of the Society to consider submitting a paper or two to an Australian journal. The American Mathematical Society
manages to provide financial services to its
members, such as relatively inexpensive life
insurance, and the Australian Medical Association has negotiated fee-free credit cards,
but the AustMS is not big enough to havemuch bargaining power; anyway, bigger societies here in Australia which have exploredthese avenues say that they help to retain
members but not to attract them. Professional societies which have a union-type roleseem to be healthier—as long as they run aclosed shop, which we cannot, and which
is not something that we can reasonably aspire to in the present industrial relations climate.
What is the role of the Annual Conference? Legally, the Society has to have anannual meeting, which reviews the financial
reports, summarises the achievements of thepast year, and decides the strategy for thenext year. Annual meetings also serve foryounger members who are aspiring to mathematical careers to make themselves known,
by giving talks on their work, and in countries where there is a healthier job market,
the annual meeting continues to fulfill thisrole. And in the past, when we communicated by letters, the annual meeting offeredmembers the occasion to exchange views “inreal time” and to reinforce personal networks by personal contact.
Can it be that modern communications
have reduced the need for this kind of interaction? I was looking through the file ofa just-retired colleague recently, hoping tofind juicy tidbits to relate at a dinner in hishonour, and I was struck by some of the226

President’s column

older correspondence, especially that relating to his employment. In the 1970s, somethirty years ago, there was no email, andinternational telephone calls were prohibitively expensive, so that the sort of communication which goes on when someone applies for and is offered a position (on what
date will the position be taken up, or will
the university pay for the transportation of
the new employee’s two pianos, for instance)
took a long time; these days it usually involves little more than a few emails and thenan official letter of confirmation. Nowadays,
we can collaborate by email as fast as we canwrite mathematics in TEX, and the comparatively less expensive airfares of the momentmean that we can meet our collaborators in
the flesh from time to time without needing
the excuse of attending the annual meeting.
But surely we still need to build our networks and reinforce our relationships withpersonal contact? At times in the future,
many of us will want to have a chat withthat colleague from interstate whose work
we’d like to read about one day, and others
will want advice about dealing with a newly

arrived and clearly crazy boss, or even tochange jobs. And annual conferences are agood way to make those contacts.
Part of the AustMS’s problem is that themathematical sciences are becoming morediffuse. Mathematics has had some triumphs recently: arguably five of the sixteen new Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science are mathematical scientists(at least some of the time; though not all
are members of the Society), as are several
Federation Fellows, and three of the twentyfour winners of 2005 Eureka Prizes for Science (awarded by the Australian Museumin Sydney in August 2005) used mathematics in their work in an essential way. Buta number of these people do not identify
themselves as mathematical scientists. I argue that if the Society is to continue to havea role to play in the future, we need to reinvent ourselves, to recognise that the natureof mathematics is changing. It is up to themembers, older and (particularly) younger,
to work out how we should do this. But it
is in all our interests to do so!