S4P_MIT

It may not be too late to register for next month’s conference, at MIT, of the Scientists for Palestine network.  This is the third international meeting, and unlike the previous meetings at Cambridge University and at Columbia, this is the first to be co-sponsored by its host university.

Past conferences have focused primarily on physics, but at least one scheduled speaker is a mathematician (topologist Marwan Awartani), and I expect the mathematical sciences will be well represented.  A complete schedule will be posted here when it is made available.

Normally I would have expected the AMS inclusion/exclusion blog to be willing to help publicize such a meeting, since in many respects Palestinians live their entire lives in a state of exclusion.  But I learned that that is not the appropriate venue when my request to publicize last year’s meeting at Columbia was refused:

I’m sorry to say that the Editorial Board had decided that this submission was not quite appropriate for the blog, and I do apologize for not replying to you sooner (before the conference had already happened). Certainly posts on the struggles and successes of Palestinian mathematicians, particular first-person stories of such, are completely appropriate for this blog.  Unfortunately, press releases about conferences, even releases with added introductions and/or commentary, are not appropriate.

Perhaps a mathematician who attended this conference could write a blog post about their experience there, about any Palestinian mathematicians they met, and particularly about any conference talks by mathematicians.   This sort of personal review of a mathematics conference is common on this blog…

Apparently the inclusion/exclusion blog prefers to focus on individual rather than collective exclusion stories.  The present blog reaches a limited audience, but some of my readers have a more extensive presence on social media:  Twitter directed at least 350 visits to my blog over the last two days.  I hope those readers who can do so will help to spread the word.