The Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM) has released its 2024 Annual Report, a comprehensive overview of the centre’s scientific output, institutional developments, training initiatives, and outreach activities over the past year. This edition carries particular significance, as it coincides with the 40th anniversary of the CRM, established in 1984 by Manuel Castellet as the first institute in Spain exclusively devoted to mathematical research.
The year 2024 has been pivotal for the CRM. The centre recorded over 120 scientific publications, expanded institutional ties, and renewed its affiliations with researchers from the UAB, UB and UPC. Additionally, the process has begun to formally include the University of Barcelona and the UPC on the CRM’s Board of Trustees, reinforcing the centre’s role within the Catalan university system.
Highlights of the year include a visit from Terence Tao, who delivered the CRM Annual Colloquium. The CRM has also continued to support early-career researchers through initiatives like the Hypatia Graduate School, BIMR, JISD and BAMB, while the SIJIMat seminar series has consolidated its role as a platform for junior researchers to exchange ideas.
In her foreword, CRM Director Carme Cascante underlines that “the talent, vision, and dedication that define the CRM remain strong,” and expresses her gratitude to everyone who helped make 2024 such a remarkable year.
You can read and download the full 2024 Annual Report here:
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CRM CommPau Varela & Natalia Vallina
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The CRM exhibition ‘Les matemàtiques de Gaudí’ moves to the University of Barcelona
After its October run at the UAB, the exhibition Les matemàtiques de Gaudí, produced by the CRM, can be seen at the University of Barcelona’s CRAI Biblioteca de Matemàtiques i Informàtica from 2 to 30 November 2026.
Advanced Course on Free Boundary Problems Opens the Intensive Weeks of the IRP
From 26 to 30 October, around forty researchers attended the Advanced Course on Free Boundary Problems at the CRM, three seven-hour mini-courses given by Bozhidar Velichkov (Università di Pisa), Max Engelstein (University of Minnesota) and Zihui Zhao (Johns Hopkins University). The course was the first of the two intensive weeks of the Intensive Research Programme on Analysis of Free Boundary Problems, which runs until 4 December.
El CRM rep els estudiants de la prova de nivell de Bojos per les Matemàtiques 2027
Els aspirants a Bojos per les Matemàtiques 2027 van visitar el Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM) dissabte 24 d’octubre, després de fer la prova de nivell a la Facultat de Ciències i Biociències de la UAB. En acabat, Tomás Sanz (UB-CRM) els va explicar què té a veure l’escalfament d’una barra de ferro amb els àudios de WhatsApp.
Eight CRM Researchers in the 2026 Stanford-Elsevier List of Highly Cited Scientists
The Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM) has eight researchers in the 2026 update of the Stanford-Elsevier ranking of highly cited scientists, which John P. A. Ioannidis (Stanford University) and Jeroen Baas (Elsevier) compile from Scopus data. Xavier Cabré, Álvaro Corral, Tim Myers, Xavier Ros-Oton, Sergey Tikhonov and Xavier Tolsa appear both in the career-long ranking and in the one for 2025, and Diego Vidaurre and Simeon Ball in the 2025 ranking.
Fish schools and growing tissues: a workshop on how collective behaviour emerges
The Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM) organised the Barcelona Workshop on Kinetic and Macroscopic Models in Biology with Friends II, held from 7 to 10 September at the Institut d’Estudis Catalans. More than thirty researchers discussed how order at the scale of tissues and animal groups arises from local interactions between individuals, in a programme that included talks by CRM researchers Daria Stepanova and Juan Arellano-Tintó. Two of the speakers, James Sharpe (EMBL Barcelona) and Chiara Villa (CNRS, Université Paris Cité), talked to the CRM about their research.
The CRM opens the academic year and unveils its Directors’ Gallery
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When the reward comes within reach, the brain changes what it compares
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Almost every automaton can be reset with a short word
Guillaume Chapuy (Université Paris Cité, CNRS) and Guillem Perarnau (UPC, CRM) have shown that a random finite automaton with n states can, with high probability, be reset by a word of length of order √n log n. The result, published in ACM Transactions on Algorithms, pins the exponent at 1/2, the lower end of a decade of numerical estimates, and addresses the random version of the synchronization problem behind a conjecture Ján Černý posed in 1964 and which still remains open.
Exposició ‘Les matemàtiques de Gaudí’
CRM quod erat demonstrandum | 48
ADA: Decoding Brain Signals Misaligned in Time
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