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Climate impacts hit us directly as e.g. floods and forest fires, but also cascade over borders. How can we address these transboundary climate risks (TCRs)? To answer this, the Nordic Council of Ministers commissioned a study. As open economies, the Nordics can be exposed to TCRs. Some key trade partners have medium (e.g. China) or even high (e.g. India) risk. The study dove deeper into six food commodities. For example, climate change affects sources of maize negatively, with risks outweighing opportunities by 28:1. This can mean higher prices or disturbances in supplies. The Nordics are better prepared than most others, but not well enough. There are also important differences among them. The report makes recommendations on how Nordics can better address TCRs together. These include a joint research programme, raising awareness and engaging with the private sector.

In the recent report Engage to Excel,1 President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) identifies mathematics as a bottleneck in undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. Among PCAST’s recommendations are ones calling for the development and teaching of college-level mathematics courses “by faculty from mathematics-intensive disciplines other than mathematics” and for “a new pathway for producing K–12 mathematics teachers…in programs in mathematics-intensive fields other than mathematics.”2 While we are in sharp disagreement with these specific recommendations, we do share PCAST’s concern for the state of STEM education. We encourage the mathematics community to focus constructively on the broad view the report sketches. We appeal to the community to amplify its communications with other STEM disciplines, to publicize its teaching innovations, and to redouble its efforts to meet the challenges discussed by PCAST.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mathematics, 2002., Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-100)., The focus of this thesis is manifolds with group actions, in particular symplectic manifolds with Hamiltonian torus actions. We investigate the relationship between the equivariant cohomology of the manifold M and the fixed point data of the torus action. We are interested in understanding the topology of the space of T-orbits in M. In particular, we explore aspects of this topology which are determined by data from the image of a moment map [Phi] : M [right arrow] t* associated to the Hamiltonian action. To better understand the orbit space, we apply the algebraic techniques of equivariant cohomology to the study these systems further. Equivariant cohomology associates to a manifold with a G-action a ring H*G(M). Much of the topology of the orbit space is encoded in the equivariant cohomology ring H*G(M). In 1998, Goresky, Kottwitz and MacPherson provided a new method for computing this ring. Their method associates to this orbit space a graph [Gamma] whose vertices are the zero-dimensional orbits and edges the connected components of the set of one-dimensional orbits. The ring H*G(M) can then be computed combinatorially in terms of the data incorporated in [Gamma]. The strength of this construction is that it makes the computation of equivariant cohomology into a combinatorial computation, rather than a topological one. In the projects described herein, we apply the GKM theory to the case of homogeneous spaces by studying the combinatorics of their associated graphs. We exploit this theory to understand the geometry of homogeneous spaces with non-zero Euler characteristic., (cont.) Next, we describe how to weaken the hypotheses of the GKM theorem. The spaces to which the GKM theorem applies must satisfy certain dimension conditions; however, there are many manifolds M with naturally arising T-actions that do not satisfy these conditions. We allow a more general situation, which includes some of these cases. Finally, we find a theory identical to the GKM theory in a setting suggested by work of Duistermaat. As in the GKM situation, this theory applies only when the spaces involved satisfy certain dimension conditions., by Tara Suzanne Holm., Ph.D.