“The Roadmap to Our New Century” is the strategic plan of the University of Miami as it approaches its centennial in 2025. Recognizing that Miami is effectively the de facto capital of Latin America and the Caribbean is a pervading theme informing its Roadmap Initiative. Indeed, as noted on the University website: “Our location in Miami gives us a distinct geographic capacity to connect institutions, individuals, and ideas across the Americas and throughout the world.” The notion of exploiting this advantage to establish a hemispheric center in mathematics and its applications at the University of Miami is one that has been in the ether here for over 15 years. Now after a substantial buildup on multiple fronts and thanks to an initial award from the Simons Foundation of $2,000,000 and enthusiastic support from the University, we have inaugurated the Institute of the Mathematical Sciences of the Americas (IMSA) at the University of Miami. Ludmil Katzarkov is Executive Director with a preeminent Scientific Advisory Committee consisting of Phillip Griffiths, Simon Levin, Maxime Kontsevich, Richard Stanley, Ernesto Lupercio, Marcelo Viana, Mina Teicher, Bernardo Uribe, Carolina Araujo, Moira Chas, Gabiela Olmedo-Alvarez.
The mission of IMSA is threefold: (1) To foster and facilitate research in mathematics and its applications across the Americas; (2) To disseminate advances from this research broadly and interactively to the global mathematical and scientific communities; and (3) To build national and international capacity in the mathematical science workforce by providing targeted educational opportunities at key points in human intellectual development from middle school through postdoctoral training.
