July & August at ICMAT

From 23 June to 4 July 2025, 86 final-year undergraduate and Master’s students (30.4% of them women) had the chance to engage directly with cutting-edge research topics and professionals at the JAE School of Mathematics at ICMAT. Although the majority of the 2025 JAE School students came from Spanish universities (65% from Madrid, but also from Barcelona, Zaragoza, Granada, Santiago de Compostela, Alicante, Valladolid, Oviedo and Bilbao), this year’s cohort also included students from Sorbonne University (France), Brown University (USA), Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil), Oxford and Heriot-Watt (both in the UK), the University of Bucharest (Hungary) and ETH Zürich (Switzerland).

For over five decades, a question posed by mathematician Gilbert Baumslag has challenged group theorists. Now, in an article published in the journal Annals of Mathematics, Andrei Jaikin, Research Professor at the CSIC and member of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (ICMAT), and Marco Linton, Severo Ochoa postdoctoral researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) at ICMAT, have provided a definitive answer to that question.

Vicent Caselles Awards 2025 from the BBVA Foundation and the Spanish Royal Mathematical Society (RSME)
 

Vicent Caselles Awards 2025 from the BBVA Foundation and the Spanish Royal Mathematical Society (RSME)

Eduardo Tablate: "A very important part of mathematical work is related to mood and motivation”

Eduardo Tablate – adjunct professor en la Universidad CEU San Pablo at CEU San Pablo University – has received one of the Vicent Caselles awards granted by the Spanish Royal Mathematical Society and the BBVA Foundation for his work during his thesis. Tablate was able to bring together the two areas of mathematics that most interested him: group theory and functional analysis. After several research initiation grants, he began working in these fields within the group led by Javier Parcet (ICMAT-CSIC), during his master’s degree, thanks to an ICMAT Master’s SO grant. Parcet and José Conde (ICMAT-UAM) were the directors of his thesis. 

The Mathematical Council of the Americas (MCA) has awarded two of its five MCA 2025 Prizes to researchers who completed their PhDs at ICMAT: Javier Gómez Serrano, a researcher at Brown University (USA), an expert in partial differential equations; and Roger Casals, a researcher at the University of California, Davis (USA), a specialist in symplectic and contact topology. This is the first time a Spaniard has received this award, which recognises, every four years, the work of researchers at the mid-career stage who were trained in or are currently working in an American country.

A new study, carried out by David Martín de Diego (ICMAT-CSIC), Sebastián J. Ferraro (universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina), and Rodrigo T. Sato Martín de Almagro (The Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany), develops mathematical techniques to find optimal trajectories with given initial and final conditions. They propose an algorithm based on discrete variational methods, which preserve key properties of the physical system and allow for efficient implementation using parallel computing. The tool is being integrated into real navigation projects using meteorological and oceanographic data.

A few months ago, all issues of the Revista de la Sociedad Española de Matemáticas (Journal of the Spanish Mathematical Society), a pioneering scientific journal from the early 20th century, were made publicly available. This publication joins the archive of Spanish mathematician Julio Rey Pastor, also preserved and digitized by the Jorge Juan Library of the CSIC, which serves ICMAT and IFT. The collection of documents provides insight into the early stages of mathematical research in Spain.

ICMAT is organising the following key activity in the coming months:

25-26/09/2025. Groups in Madrid 2025

26/09/2025. European Researchers Night 2025