Dear friend of SMRI,

The new academic year has started with the Quadrangle bustling with students and live music filling the air during Welcome Week. There was a great sense of excitement by both students and staff to be able to commence face-to-face interactions again on campus.

Activities at SMRI have likewise resumed in the Quad. Visitors are coming through the doors to spend intensive periods of time on collaborative research. We have started a number of hybrid seminar series that aim to combine the best of both worlds: allowing speakers to interact with audience members in both the online and the physical space.

We are also looking forward to extending this to the greater public, with SMRI Director Geordie Williamson’s Sydney Ideas Event “Maths, AI and intuition” in mid-March.

In other exciting news, Geordie has been invited to present a public lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in July this year. This event, initially planned to take place in St Petersburg, will now be hosted from Europe as a fully online event. We reach out to our friends and colleagues in Ukraine and Russia who are impacted by the military operations directed by Russia against Ukraine, and hope that peace returns to Europe swiftly.

— Professor Stephan Tillmann