The International Center for Mathematics (CIM) in 2009 has continued to promote and to organize several meetings and interdisciplinary conferences in the Mathematical Sciences. This Bulletin, as well as CIM’s web page, announces the continuation of initiatives for 2010 that is able to sponsor and/or promote. In spite of the difficulties of its current financial situation, CIM aims to pursue the development of research in mathematics and the promotion of international cooperation between researchers in the Mathematical Sciences. In particular, its Direction intends to establish protocols with institutional associates with a view to a greater participation by these institutions in interdisciplinary activities. In particular, to stimulate and to facilitate programme activities among its more than forty associates, CIM calls for individual or joint proposals of mathematical research activities to be done in Portugal for 2011 and 2012, namely for the organisation of short or longer thematic programmes, conferences, workshops, specialized summer courses, or courses in partnership with associates, specially for interdisciplinary subjects within mathematics and other sciences, technology and society, from climate and energy to mathematics education, from nanotechnology to bio-sciences, from computation to complex systems. Those interested in proposing initiatives to CIM are invited to contact the Direction members.

Everyone agrees that the world is now more digital than ever. Information technology is profoundly transforming the ways in which scholars consume research and disseminate their outputs. Content may still be used in different formats (e.g., people find articles online and print them locally) and on different devices (e.g., iPods, Kindles, handheld readers), but increasingly it must be at least discoverable online to reach readers. For that reason, literature in non-digital format is losing its audience. In many disciplines, people are aware of such problems and are developing initiatives to transform the relevant non-digital resources (e.g., books, journals, maps) to digital formats, organizing them in coherent collections (e.g., see the World Digital Library by UN- ESCO at [1]).

The programme of the conference “Didactics of Mathematics as a Mathematical Discipline”, that was held in Fun- chal last October 1-4, 2009, can be found in http://glocos.org/index.php/dm-md/. This conference was the first one associated with the IMU/ICMI Klein project, http://www.mathunion.org/index.php?id=805, The Klein Project, inspired by the Felix Klein’s famous book Elementarmathematik vom h ̈oheren Standpunkte aus, published one century ago, is intended as a stimulus for mathematical teachers, so to help them to make connections between the mathematics they teach, or can be asked to teach, and the field of mathematics, while taking into account the evolution of this field over the last century. The project will have three outputs: a book simultaneously published in several languages, a resource DVD to assist teachers wishing to bring some of the ideas to realisation in their classes, and a wiki-based web-site seen as a vehicle for the many people who will wish to contribute to the project in an on-going way. This report to the Design Team of the Klein project will focus on themes and contributions that arose in discussion at the Madeira meeting, that were strongly debated, or that received some consensus.

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of “On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection”, a landmark in Biology, CIM has organised an international conference on “The Mathematics of Darwin’s Legacy”, in collaboration with the European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology. This conference brought to Lisbon Mats Gyllenberg, professor of applied mathematics (biomathematics) and chairman of the Department of Mathematics of the University of Helsinki. This article is an edited conversation held during the conference with one of the conference organisers and currently director of CIM.

Every mathematician will meet a good dose of linear algebra in his/her battle to reach nirvanna, be it as stepping stone to infinite dimensions, or as an entry into more abstract algebra, or as a computational tool in numerical analysis.

The United Nations 62nd General Assembly, in order to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first telescopic observations, has declared 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009). This celebration was intended to make widely known the importance of Astronomy as a science and as a technique. Among the different strategies proposed to reach this aim, the Por- tuguese National Committee of the IYA2009, formed by the Portuguese Society of Astronomy, emphasized the need to promote events related to the history of Astronomy.