Discussion

Why mathematicians are boycotting their biggest conference

amelius: Reminds me of:https://theconversation.com/calls-for-a-boycott-of-the-2026-...

jleyank: Nobody will care if the conference isn’t held in Philly. Holding it elsewhere will probably make it a little easier and possibly a little cheaper for people to attend. I doubt mathematicians are part of the 1%, so cash and travel hassle should matter. And given today’s Internet, there’s going to be remote attendance which can happen most anywhere.While it’s still convenient to gather together to discuss a field, it’s not crucial as it was in past times. Easier to do what’s best for the largest number of people.

beloch: It's relatively easy to attend a talk virtually. It's not so easy to pull aside the right couple of people to chat, attend workshops, or just simply go at it on the whiteboard with somebody. It's just plain awkward to have a working dinner over skype. You're definitely missing out on a lot if you don't attend in person.If this conference were held tomorrow, it'd be a fustercluck of delays and annoyances just getting people through U.S. airports in their current state. That might be sorted out by July (when its scheduled), but it's very likely some other things will be happening by then. The U.S. is not being run in a predictable way right now. There's a strong case to move the conference elsewhere even before you bring politics into consideration.

FridayoLeary: It's just grandstanding.They are mathematicians not political activists. If they want their organization to slide into irrelevance, getting involved in left wing (or right wing, but with academia it's usually left wing) politics is a great way to do that.

nullc: I'm going to guess that for many signers-- or at least the US ones-- their opposition to the United States and "its unbridled hatred" doesn't extend to not accepting funding from the US taxpayer.Entry requirements and the overhead of dealing with visa hoops are a perennial problem for international conferences, nothing new-- and presumably a part of why it hasn't been held in the US in recent memory. But the language on this petition is particularly extreme.

beloch: "The petition follows months of trepidation about the congress within the math community. “You do not get 1,500 signatures in 10 days without having many, many mathematicians already registering their complaints to their professional societies and to the ICM organizers,” says Ila Varma, a mathematician at the University of Toronto and one of the petition’s co-authors."-------------ICM's peak attendance is around four thousand, so 1,500 would-be attendees signing a petition to move the conference in ten days is pretty authoritative.

dhosek: Ain’t much US taxpayer money going to mathematicians and I think that if any goes overseas it would be to US citizens.

tdeck: Anyone can be a "political activist". An activist is just an ordinary person who has had enough. Unless you believe the only valid way to influence political discourse is with money.

hagbard_c: Sure, anyone can be an activist but it is clear that academia has been turned into an activist training centre. It is also remarkable how these supposedly intelligent people go astray when it comes to the causes they support, from supporting Hamas to defending those who'd throw them off high buildings or putting them against the wall if they got their chance.

williamstein: FWIW, the Joint Mathematics Meeting is bigger, based on number of registered attendees [1].[1] https://jointmathematicsmeetings.org/meetings/national/jmm20...

nullc: Training would imply that it made effective activists, but activism from these quarters tends to alienate outsiders. It's more purity spiral than activism.

hagbard_c: Well, no, I don't think training necessarily would make them effective given the context of academic activism. If the whole world would look like a college campus it might but there is such a big disconnect between the real world and academia that even the best trained academic activist ends up doing just what you describe. In some parts of society it has worked though, viz. the rise of the 'DEI' phenomenon driven in part by the infusion of academics into organisations who used their positions to bring in more academics of similar mindset while shunning those who did not subscribe to the desired narrative. Where it used to be said that it did no harm to let those silly students larp revolutionaries because they'd drop all that when they re-entered 'the real world' the truth turned out to be reversed in that they took all that ideological baggage with them into society.