Dear Professor Talay,
President of the Société de Mathématiques Appliquées et Industrielles (SMAI),

Let me introduce myself. My name is Ari Laptev and I am Professor of
Mathematics at Imperial College London and at KTH in Stockholm.
I have been elected as the President of the European Mathematical Society
(EMS) for the period January 2007 - December 2010.

EMS is a relatively new Society which still needs to attract many more
individual members, by providing a service which will meet the needs
of every European mathematician.

Many important aims have already been achieved. Among them is the
establishment of the EMS Publishing House, a non-profit organization,
to which six journals and several book series are already contracted.
It has been responsible for all the publications related to this year ?s
International Congress of Mathematics in Madrid.

The EMS plays an increasingly important role in relation to the governing
bodies of the European Union. In particular, it is able to act as an
intermediary for all European mathematicians, in contrast to the more
limited possibilities of National Mathematical Societies.

The EMS promotes the quadrennial European Congress of Mathematics
which awards ten prizes to young European Mathematicians.
It also runs a series of mathematical weekends and supports
European Summer Schools. Many EMS Committees are involved in
a large spectrum of activities.

The EMS Newsletter continues to improve in content and is now a
valuable source of information concerning job opportunities,
new publications, European Conferences, etc. It regularly
publishes interviews with prominent mathematicians as well as
articles of general interest.

Among our ambitions today is the encouragement of a closer
collaboration between Pure and Applied Mathematics. We also plan to
actively draw the attention of the younger generation of mathematicians
to the beauty, diversity and importance of Mathematics.

Our concern is to make the EMS more visible and more efficient in
its promotion of Mathematics within Europe. We must highlight the
significance of Mathematics as a field of competence which is absolutely
crucial to almost all areas of future Science and Engineering.

The creation of the European Research Council
is an important step forward for Science in Europe and we all hope
that the ERC will ultimately be financially self-sufficient and independent
of Brussels ? bureaucratic structure. Please pay attention to the web page :
http://erc.europa.eu.
There is a call for grant applications to young mathematicians, see documents
http://ec.europa.eu/research/fp7/
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/home_en.html
It could be also useful to look at
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ideas/home_en.html
and click on
"ERC Starting Independent Research Grant" [PDF]

As far as I understand the most important cite for us is :
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/dc/index.cfm
click on : Ideas : 2006-12-22 : ERC-2007-StG

I would like to use this opportunity to advertise Zentralblatt (ZB).
EMS is one of the three owners of ZB. It recently became clear that ZB
is about to launch an Author Data base of high quality which could be
a good alternative to MathSciNet.
We have agreed with Springer that this data base will be available,
free of charge, to all users for three months starting from April 2007.
Moreover, it also has been agreed that all EMS individual members will
have free access to this Data Base for at least two years.
All members will be provided with a password and be able to log-in from
any computer.

It is my strong wish to have a closer contact with your Society members and
I would be very grateful if you forward this letter to them.

Finally, I wish you a very Happy New Year.

Yours sincerely,
Ari Laptev