The letter below is a letter to all Presidents of Mathematical Societies of European Countries. It is my strong wish to have a closer contact with your Society members and I would be very grateful if you forward this letter to them. With best regards and Happy New Year, Ari PS. I suppose that many of the members of the SPb Math Soc know me, but I assume that there are many younger mathematicians who never heard of me. So I begin my letter by introducing myself :-). %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Dear Colleague, Let me introduce myself. My name is Ari Laptev and I am Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College London and at KTH in Stockholm. I have been elected as the President of the European Mathematical Society (EMS) for the period January 2007 - December 2010. EMS is a relatively new Society which still needs to attract many more individual members, by providing a service which will meet the needs of every European mathematician. Many important aims have already been achieved. Among them is the establishment of the EMS Publishing House, a non-profit organization, to which six journals and several book series are already contracted. It has been responsible for all the publications related to this year’s International Congress of Mathematics in Madrid. The EMS plays an increasingly important role in relation to the governing bodies of the European Union. In particular, it is able to act as an intermediary for all European mathematicians, in contrast to the more limited possibilities of National Mathematical Societies. The EMS promotes the quadrennial European Congress of Mathematics which awards ten prizes to young European Mathematicians. It also runs a series of mathematical weekends and supports European Summer Schools. Many EMS Committees are involved in a large spectrum of activities. The EMS Newsletter continues to improve in content and is now a valuable source of information concerning job opportunities, new publications, European Conferences, etc. It regularly publishes interviews with prominent mathematicians as well as articles of general interest. Among our ambitions today is the encouragement of a closer collaboration between Pure and Applied Mathematics. We also plan to actively draw the attention of the younger generation of mathematicians to the beauty, diversity and importance of Mathematics. Our concern is to make the EMS more visible and more efficient in its promotion of Mathematics within Europe. We must highlight the significance of Mathematics as a field of competence which is absolutely crucial to almost all areas of future Science and Engineering. As far as I understand the most important cite for us is: http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/dc/index.cfm click on: Ideas: 2006-12-22: ERC-2007-StG I would like to use this opportunity to advertise Zentralblatt (ZB). EMS is one of the three owners of ZB. It recently became clear that ZB is about to launch an Author Data base of high quality which could be a good alternative to MathSciNet. We have agreed with Springer that this data base will be available, free of charge, to all users for three months starting from April 2007. Moreover, it also has been agreed that all EMS individual members will have free access to this Data Base for at least two years. All members will be provided with a password and be able to log-in from any computer. Finally, I wish you a very Happy New Year. Yours sincerely, Ari Laptev