The Winter Meeting and the First CMS Job Fair organized in Montreal by the Département de mathématiques et de statistique have attracted a record number of 439 registered participants: 355 at the Winter Meeting and 115 at the Job Fair. The two events were preceded by the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the CRM (December 10). On the occasion the new director, Jacques Hurtubise, invited all the CMS delegates to a truly memorable reception in the evening. Christiane Rousseau took up the challenging task of organizing the very successful First CMS Job Fair on December 14.

The Meeting was also blessed by a record number of sponsoring organizations:

• Bell Canada University Laboratory (Bell)
• Centre de recherches mathématiques (CRM)
• Institut des sciences mathématiques (ISM)
• Laboratoire de combinatoire et d'informatique mathématique (LaCIM)
• Network for Computing and Mathematical Modeling (NCM₂)
• The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences (Fields)
• The Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIms). Support also came from the Principal's and Dean's offices of the Université de Montréal.

The scientific and educational programme was strong and offered a wide variety of topics and events (nine plenary lectures, nine symposia, a forum on the teaching of linear algebra, a graduate students seminar, a contributed papers session, and a workshop). The Meeting occupied all the lecture rooms available in the Conference Center of the Hotel du Parc and could unfortunately not accommodate more symposia, events or activities. A private television channel was on site to interview speakers, participants and students. Véronique Hussin managed all the local arrangements smoothly and efficiently.

Nine plenary talks were delivered by top mathematicians and rising stars. Jennifer Chayes (Microsoft Corporation) gave the Public Lecture entitled ``Phase Transitions in Computer Science: What Makes Hard Problems Hard?", Andreas Dress (University of Bielefeld) on ``Virtual Crystallography and Tiling Theory", Adriano Garsia (University of California - San Diego) on ``Update on the n! conjecture", Elliot H. Lieb (Princeton University) on ``The quantum-mechanical world view: A remarkably successful but still incomplete theory", David C. Lay (University of Maryland) on ``Recent advances in teaching linear algebra", Pavel A. Pevzner (University of Southern California) on ``Transforming Mice into Men", and Zhihong Xia (Northwestern and Georgia Tech) on ``Hamiltonian dynamical systems". Maciej Zworski (University of California - Berkeley) gave the Coxeter-James Lecture entitled ``The inverse problem for resonances" and Jian Shen (Queen's University) the Doctoral Prize lecture ``On the Caccetta-Haggkvist conjecture and some related conjectures".

The symposia were held on the following topics.

• Algebraic and geometric methods in differential equations: the 20-th century in celestial mechanics and one century of work on Hilbert's 16th problem (CMS - CRM), org. Angelo Mingarelli (Carleton University), Christiane Rousseau (Université de Montréal).
• Algebraic combinatorics, group representations and Macdonald polynomials (CRM - LaCIM - CMS), org. François Bergeron (Université du Québec à Montréal), Nantel Bergeron (York University), Mike Zabrocki (Université du Québec à Montréal and CRM).
• Applied logic, org. Wendy MacCaull (St-Francis Xavier University), Prakash Panangaden (McGill University), Phil Scott (University of Ottawa).
• Computing and mathematical modelling (CMS - NCM2), org. Pierre Hansen (École des Hautes Études Commerciales), Gilbert Laporte (Centre de Recherche sur les Transports).
• General History of mathematics, org. Richard O'Lander and Ronald Sklar (St-John's University, USA).
• Mathematical genetics and genomics (CMS - Fields), org. Sabin Lessard (Université de Montréal), David Sankoff (Université de Montréal).
• Mathematical physics (CMS - PIms), I. Probability methods and applications, and II. Group theory methods and application, org. George Bluman (University of British Columbia), Michel Grundland (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and CRM), Gordon Slade (University of British Columbia)
• Orders, lattices and universal algebra, org. Lucien Haddad (Royal Military College), Benoît Larose (Collège régional Champlain), Ivo Rosenberg (Université de Montréal).
• Symposium and forum on the teaching of linear algebra, org. Joel Hillel (Concordia University), Jacqueline Klasa (Collège Vanier), Véronique Hussin (Université de Montréal). The Graduate students seminar (CMS - ISM), was organized by Abraham Broer (Université de Montréal), Paul Libbrecht (Université du Québec à Montréal), Alexandra Haedrich (Université du Québec à Montréal), Thomas Mattman (McGill University). The Workshop on ``Mathematicians, TeX and the World Wide Web, where are we going?" was organized by Michael Doob (University of Manitoba and CMS TeX Editor).

The Forum attracted a large number of CEGEP and High School Teachers. Both the Graduate students seminar and the Forum were generously supported by the ISM. Finally the Contributed papers session organized by Paul Arminjon (Université de Montréal) was extremely successful and some papers had to be transferred to other sessions to meet the strong demand.

Michel Delfour, Meeting Director

Montreal, March 28, 2000