Travel Grants Help Hundreds of Mathematicians Attend ICM 2026

This July, math professionals from around the world will gather in Philadelphia to celebrate the discipline’s most foundational event: the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). The meeting, held every four years, brings together the international mathematics community to collectively shape the discipline’s future.

For Lucas de Souza Almeida, a mathematician at the State University of Campinas in Brazil, attending for the first time is an exciting prospect. In addition to networking with peers and watching as the field’s most prestigious prize, the Fields Medal, is awarded, de Souza Almeida will present his research on differential geometry (the use of calculus to study curved spaces).

“I will be finishing my Ph.D. this year, so it is a great moment to build connections,” he says. “Sometimes I can hardly believe that the son of a construction worker and a homemaker is going to present his own work at the most important mathematics event in the world.”

De Souza Almeida’s participation, and that of hundreds of other mathematicians, is made possible in part by a travel grant from the Simons Foundation. To increase representation from scientists in developing nations, the Simons Foundation offered full travel support to 688 attendees from 76 countries. The program is a partnership with the International Mathematical Union, the Commission for Developing Countries and the American Mathematical Society.

Wilfrid Gangbo, a mathematics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and chair of the travel grant committee, says that these awards seek not just to remedy global imbalances but also to bring additional perspectives to the table. This year marks the first time the event has been held in the United States since the 1980s, yet the country is among the most expensive in the world to visit.

“Some people have more privileges than others, and we think it’s good to show that even if we are not yet able to close that gap, we are paying attention and working to be more inclusive,” Gangbo says. Great mathematicians can come from anywhere, he notes, so it’s important to cultivate talent by connecting people with their peers.

In the past, a colleague whom Gangbo knew from his own home country of Benin, in West Africa, struck up a conversation with Fields Medal–winner Cédric Villani at an ICM gathering. The two men launched a partnership between the Mathematics Institute of Jussieu–Paris Rive Gauche in France and the Benin Institute for Mathematics and Physics to improve international collaborations and to foster a new generation of mathematicians. “My personal hope is to hear more stories like that coming out of this meeting,” Gangbo says.

To assess the applications, he oversaw a group of dozens of volunteers organized into eight regional subcommittees so that, for example, submissions by African researchers were judged by others living and working in Africa. “They know these applicants better than we do, and so are better placed to evaluate the impact of their work alongside their other professional contributions,” Gangbo says.

For this cycle roughly 2,000 people applied for the travel grants, and about one-third were selected. Awardees will travel to the U.S from countries including Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, Armenia and the Philippines, with many attending ICM for the first time.

Diana Davidova, a mathematician at the Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, previously attended the 2022 meeting in Helsinki. She says that even as she benefited from talking shop with people in her same subfield of discrete functions, she was surprised by how much inspiration she took away from researchers working in vastly different spaces. This year, she most looks forward to engaging with new ideas and to expanding her foundational knowledge of mathematics as a broad and evolving discipline.

“I am excited to attend the plenary lectures to learn about breakthroughs outside my immediate research topic, and to engage in face-to-face discussions with specialists from around the world,” she says. “Being in Pennsylvania for this event offers a unique chance to build an international network that I hope will lead to future collaborations.”

The idea that ICM can spark new and potentially innovative collaborations is also on the mind of Gervy Marie Angeles, a mathematician at the University of the Philippines Diliman who is attending ICM for the first time. Having previously published with someone she met at a smaller conference, she hopes to cultivate similar relationships at this year’s meeting. Angeles’ work uses math to model biological systems, focusing on how certain types of cells can orchestrate a crawling form of motion. She does her best to familiarize herself with the names of people working in the same space, she says, but it’s another thing to put faces to those names.

“There is something special about meeting the people behind the books and articles I reference,” says Angeles. “Most of all, I look forward to the serendipity that comes with these gatherings — the chance meetings and spontaneous exchanges — that no online interaction can really replace.”

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