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Letter to the EditorLetter to the EditorMassimo Ferri (Università di Bologna, Italy)The Role of ApplicationorientedMathematicsDear Editor,In the March Newsletter, Ciro Ciliberto, President of theItalian Mathematical Union, complained about the negativecomments on a Marie Curie fellowship proposal inmathematics, concerning a lack of interdisciplinarity andsocio-economic impact of the proposed project. I fullyagree with him on the fact that the evaluation criteriaseem not to comprehend the specificities of pure mathematicalresearch; I hope that it will be possible to givethese criteria more flexibility and also that interdisciplinaritywithin mathematics will be recognised as such.Still, it seems to me that this event stresses a point thathas already appeared in this newsletter in other forms:does mathematics “sell” itself conveniently to the scientificcommunity and society at large? I think it would benecessary to do it not only for getting funds, grants, etc.,but also as a fair attitude of mathematicians toward society.I’m not only speaking of popularisation – which isan important cultural issue anyway – but also of a bettertwo-way communication between mathematics andother scientific and technological areas. There is not just“applied” mathematics but “application-oriented” mathematics,inspired by the many facets of modern technol-ogy, which is growing fast in our departments and canprovide the link I am hoping for.Unfortunately, in my opinion, application-orientedmathematics is not given the correct appreciation withinmathematics when it comes to fund distribution and –above all – academic competition, at least in Italy. Theremay be several reasons for that: the claim that application-inspiredmathematics is of a lower level; the fact thatits correctness is more difficult to check; even a sort ofretaliation against the attitude denounced by ProfessorCiliberto (an attitude which has severe fallout in termsof funding). On the other side, mathematicians often andcorrectly “defend” on the media our discipline, pointingout its manifold applications.I think it’s high time to discuss this issue openly. I seetwo symmetric rigidities: a lack of sensitivity of somescientific environments to the specificities of pure mathematics,and a lack of sensitivity of some mathematicalenvironments to the importance of application-orientedresearch. Should we go on pretending that the problemdoes not exist? If not, how can we face it? Is this just anItalian phenomenon or a European one? I hope that theEMS Newsletter will offer its pages to a debate whichcannot be deferred any longer.Massimo FerriProfessor of Geometry at the University of BolognaNew journal from theNew in2014Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré DCombinatorics, Physics and their InteractionsISSN print 2308-5827 / ISSN online 2308-58352014. Vol 1, 4 issues. Approx. 400 pages. 17 x 24 cmPrice of subscription: 198 Euro (online only) / 238 Euro (print+online)European Mathematical Society Publishing HouseSeminar for Applied Mathematics, ETH-Zentrum SEW A27CH-8092 Zürich, Switzerlandsubscriptions@ems-ph.org / www.ems-ph.orgAims and Scope:The unfolding of new ideas in physics is often tied to the development of new combinatorial methods, and conversely someproblems in combinatorics have been successfully attacked using methods inspired by statistical physics or quantum fieldtheory. The journal is dedicated to publishing high-quality original research articles and survey articles in which combinatoricsand physics interact in both directions. Combinatorial papers should be motivated by potential applications to physicalphenomena or models, while physics papers should contain some interesting combinatorial development. Both rigorousmathematical proof and heuristic physical reasoning clearly labeled as such have a place in this journal.Editors-in-Chief:Gérard H. E. Duchamp (Univ. Paris XIII, France)Vincent Rivasseau (Univ. Paris XI, France)Alan Sokal (New York Univ., USA and Univ. College London, UK)Managing Editor:Adrian Tanasa (Univ. Paris XIII, France)EMS Newsletter June 2014 59