Notes from the 2005 Joint (AMS/MAA) Mathematics Meetings, Atlanta

Carol Hutchins
carol.hutchins@nyu.edu

The first or second week of January is still part of the holiday travel rush, often a time of bad weather, as well. Nevertheless, once I get underway, I do find attendance at the Joint Math Meetings beneficial. Such was again the case at the recent one held in Atlanta, January 5-8. For those who are unfamiliar, this is a large event (upwards of 4500 attendees) organized cooperatively by the American Mathematical Society, Mathematical Association of America, SIAM, and others. Why bother going to such an event? Well, with a little effort, you actually can gain a flavor of what the hotly researched areas in mathematics are. You can listen to issue-oriented professional panels (funding agency presentations, discussions of curricular matters, for instance), hear about award-winning research and so forth. In addition, the organizers give a special break to librarians in a very low registration fee. It also happens that the AMS Library Committee has its annual meeting at this event. Space prevents a full account of the committee's session, but among the topics we covered were: possible federated search facility for MathSciNet, status of open access math publishing, implications of Google's projects for mathematical material, MathSciNet references to pre-1940 retrodigitized material. We were introduced for the first time to Kevin F. Clancy, the new Executive Editor at Math Reviews, who explained to us that cited references are being compiled systematically for the journals covered, beginning with a few important ones. This is a long-term effort to build out. Look at the indexing for articles appearing in Annals of Mathematics, for a sample of how it is starting. Eventually, this may lead to a viable citation index lookup within MSN. This meeting was the first one at which the offerings of Kluwer and Springer were presented at one single stand. Springer typically occupies the largest exhibit stand at this meeting, aside from the spaces used by the organizing societies, AMS and MAA. One wonders whether this portends a trend of decreasingly interesting wares at these stands. The Joint Math Meetings are not the sort of gatherings which generate published proceedings. Instead, it is a venue for presentation of work in progress, a meeting ground for employers and new PhD job seekers, information exchange among educators, and people who might find enjoyable sides of geometric things, like origami or even knitting.	Math toys, JMM exhibits
	Erik D. Demaine (MIT), MAA Invited Speaker, surveying Folding and Unfolding
Erik D. Demaine (MIT), MAA Invited Speaker, more Folding and Unfolding	Fred Rickey, USMA West Point, Molly White, University of Texas Austin
Steve Rockey (Cornell), Rob Kirby (UC Berkeley)	photos by Carol Hutchins

Disclaimer