By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
South Korean academics and policymakers are looking to woo inspectors from the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in their last-minute campaigning to host the math community's largest global event.
Seoul is competing against Brazil's Rio de Janeiro and Canada's Montreal to host the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians, which takes place every four years and has been attended by an average of 4,000 mathematicians from 100-plus countries.
The congress is also famous for the awarding of the Fields Medal, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, during an opening ceremony joined by the host country's head of state.
IMU Vice President Ma Zhiming arrived in Seoul, Monday, and will be joined by the group's president Laszlo Lovasz and secretary Martin Groetschel, Tuesday. The IMU delegation plans to visit the country's top research facilities and meet government officials and mathematicians to evaluate the readiness of local organizers.
Seoul had been thought as an underdog to Rio de Janeiro, which aspires to become the first South American city to host the event, and Montreal, which plans to become the third Canadian city after Vancouver and Toronto.
However, Park Hyung-ju, a computer science professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS), is confident that Seoul represents the best bid among the three candidates cities, built around the concept to encourage participation from developing countries.
Seoul is promising to pay for the travel expenses and accommodation for about 1,000 mathematicians from countries that had not been able to participate in the event in the past. This could push the attendance of the congress above 5,000 if Seoul is announced as the winning bidder, Park said.
``We are planning to spend $2 million for the support program for the mathematicians of developing countries, which is much bigger than that Rio de Janeiro and Montreal is promising,'' said Park, who is the chairman of the Seoul bid.
`By allowing more people from the mathematics community to share their ideas and gain knowledge at the congress, we could be laying the foundation for the next generation of mathematicians, as the participants return home and inspire their peers,'' he said.
The congress was held in Madrid, Spain, in 2006 and will be hosted in Hyderabad, India, in 2010. The IMU's 11-member executive committee will pick the host city for the 2014 event at a meeting in late April, with the outcome ratified at the IMU general meeting in Bangalore, India, in August 2010.
Park says the hosting of the event will further enrich the country's talent pool in mathematics.
Since first joining the IMU in 1981, South Korea was promoted from a group-two level country to a group-four level country in 2007, completing an unprecedented two-level jump. The scale measures overall competitiveness of math research among member states, with the group-five level being the highest.
Hosting the event in Seoul could also help increase the international exposure of North Korean mathematicians, Park said. If Seoul wins the bid, organizers will allow North Korea to host some of the 60 satellite conferences before and after the nine-day congress, Park said.
North Korea lost its membership in the early 1990s because its annual fees were overdue, but has continued to attend the ICM.
The IMU delegation will tour the COEX convention center in southern Seoul, today, before meeting Prime Minister Han Seung-soo. The arena is the suggested venue for the 2014 congress.
They will meet Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon, Wednesday, and then talk with some of the country's promising math talent at KIAS.
A visit to Samsung Electronics, the country's biggest electronics maker, is scheduled for Thursday.