- Thematic Term on Optimization
- July 5-8: Workshop on Optimization in Finance
- July 11-15: Summer School on Geometric and Algebraic Approaches for Integer Programming
- July 20-22: Workshop on Optimization in Medicine
- July 26-29: Workshop on PDE Constrained Optimization
 

- Seminar of the 2005 Annual Scientific Council Meeting
- Meeting of the General Assembly of CIM
- Research in Pairs at CIM
- CIM on the Web

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The school was held on 20-24 September 2004 at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC), organized by Gabriela Gomes, Jorge Carneiro, Pedro Coutinho, Isabel Gordo, Jose Faro and Francisco Dionisio, endorsed by Centro Internacional de Matemática (CIM), and sponsored by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) and Lusolab

Modern mathematics has become pervaded by the idea that in order to cater for certain notions of symmetry, in particular of a local nature, one needs to go beyond group theory, replacing groups by groupoids. A nice survey of some implications of this idea in algebra, geometry, and analysis (as of 1996) can be found in [19]. The same idea can be expressed in terms of pseudogroups, which provide another generalization of groups, or, even more generally, by abstract inverse semigroups. See the first chapters of [7] for motivations and a good historical account.

Royal Welcome to Abel Laureate Peter Lax.
Norway’s Crown Prince Regent awarded the 2005 Abel Prize to Peter D. Lax on May 24. The city of Oslo and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters prepared for several days of events that honored Lax, including the prize ceremony, lectures by and in honor of Lax, a banquet at the Akershus Castle, and some special events for local teachers and students.

When and how did you start looking at mathematical problems arising in finance?
I became interested in Mathematical Finance and option pricing in the mid-80’s when I was finishing my dissertation at the University of Minnesota. David Heath, who would later invent a famous model for interest rate derivatives, gave a very interesting talk in the Probability Seminar on the Black-Scholes model. I think that this was the first time that I heard about options. Later, in New York, I had friends that were using the models in the early stages of interest-rate derivatives. My own entry into theoretical finance was in 1994, after teaching courses at Courant Institute. The demand for looking at these problems then came from graduate students and the industry, not from the mathematical community.