Report on the 2016 Bristol BMC

Report on the 68th British Mathematical Colloquium, Bristol 2016

We believe that the BMC 2016 was a very successful meeting – the plenary and morning talks were excellent, and we had positive feedback regarding the invited talks, special sessions, satellite meetings, speed talks and the general organisation. To summarise, we had
  • 270 participants distributed as shown:
    MaleFemale
    Invited speakers146
    Research students2912
    Other participants16049
    Total20367
  • 2 public lectures (with receptions), 6 plenary lectures, 12 morning lectures.
  • 6 special sessions in Algebra, Analysis, Combinatorics, Ergodic Theory, Number Theory, Probability, each one with 8 talks.
  • 4 satellite meetings on Thursday afternoon: Ergodic Theory, COW Algebraic Geometry, BLOC Representation Theory, Random Walks on Random Networks, of which the first three were supported by LMS Scheme 3 grants.
  • 5-minute speed talks, and a poster session for early career researchers.
  • In addition, we had the LMS presentation and signing the Members Book on Monday March 21, Conference dinner on March 22 at the Goldney Hall and the BMC Committee Meeting on March 23.
  • The BMC was attended by all the major publishers in mathematics: CUP, OUP, Springer, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, as well as the AMS. Apart from the publishers and the LMS, the BMC was supported by the Heilbronn Institute, Clay Institute, The Leverhulme Trust and Foundation Compositio Mathematica.
More information is available from the BMC website at http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/~matyd/BMC/

We were quite successful in applications for funds.
Following negotiation within the University of Bristol, we had no costs relating to lecture room hire or administration, and could keep the registration fees low -- £75 standard/£40 discounted (student/retired) early registration fees, £9050 late registration fees.
Five plenary speakers were directly funded by the Clay Institute, the Heilbronn Institute contributed £7,500 and Foundation Compositio Mathematica, a new source of funding for the BMC, Foundation contributed £2,840.
The publishers paid a total of £2,900. Many of the invited speakers used their own funds as well to come to the BMC (and have confirmed this at the last minute). Therefore we had funds left over from £17,100 that we applied for, and we returned them to the LMS.
The significant expenses were plenary/morning/special session speakers' costs £9930, early career funding £1,991, catering £8,956 (two wine receptions, lunches, tea/coffee/buscuits), conference dinner £5,416, registration packs £1,899, technical support and poster session support £465.
The expenses total £30,000, with the exception of the five speakers finded directly by the Clay Institute.