The Centre de Recerca Matemàtica Approves Its Strategic Plan for 2026–2030

The Centre de Recerca Matemàtica approved its Strategic Plan for 2026 – 2030 last month, a document that lays out where the institution is heading across research, training, and its relationship with the broader scientific community. It contains eight global objectives, four core scientific blocks, and four flagship programmes.

The CRM was founded in 1984, which makes it Spain’s oldest mathematics research institute. Since 2021, it has grown considerably, partly through framework agreements with the three main Catalan universities (UAB, UPC, and UB) and partly through the renewal of the María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence distinction, which brought two million euros in additional funding. Eight ERC grants have been awarded to CRM affiliated researchers over the past decade. Between 2022 and 2024, the centre hosted over 120 scientific events with nearly 4,500 participants from across the world. The plan takes this recent period as its starting point without treating it as a guarantee of what comes next.

The scientific programme is organised around four core areas: analysis and PDEs together with dynamical systems, algebra and geometry, mathematical modelling, and combinatorics. Additionally, the document also signals four flagship initiatives. Two of them sit at the intersection of mathematics and artificial intelligence. One develops the mathematical underpinnings of generative AI, drawing on transport theory, partial differential equations, and high-dimensional dynamical systems. The other aims to position the CRM as a reference centre in computer-assisted proofs, a field that has expanded rapidly as computational tools become capable of verifying arguments that would take humans years to check by hand. A third flagship supports the formalisation of mathematics; writing proofs in computer-verifiable language using systems like Lean or Coq, a shift that some in the field consider genuinely transformative. The fourth addresses multiscale modelling for problems in biology, climate change, and public health. These are not easy problems to put numbers on.

The document also acknowledges the CRM’s Knowledge Transfer Unit role in translating abstract mathematical results into applications with legible real-world effects. A project optimising bus networks for Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona, and collaborations with the Institut de Ciències del Mar and Alba Synchrotron, point to what this looks like when it does happen. The plan sets out mechanisms to make it happen more often.

On training, the aim is to develop the Barcelona Graduate School of Mathematics into a genuinely international reference for doctoral and postdoctoral education. The CRM currently supervises 15 to 16 defended theses per year. The plan wants to convert more master’s students into doctoral candidates (the 2023–2024 data suggests that the gap is wider than it should be), and to give postdoctoral researchers clearer pathways toward independent positions, something that has historically been left somewhat to chance.

The Strategic Plan 2026–2030 is available on the CRM website.