The workshop WICA IV – ICMS will be held July 20-24, 2026 at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS) in Edinburgh, Scotland. All program participants should hold a PhD or equivalent degree by the time the workshop takes place.
The organizers are currently seeking proposals for research problems and also for topics for dialogue groups. Proposals should be submitted via this link. The deadline for proposals is July 1, 2025. The form will ask for a PDF upload describing your proposed topic, following the description given below. A (likely proper) subset of the proposals will become part of the information available to those who apply to participate in the workshop. (Applications to participate in the workshop will open in July 2025.) Selection of topics will depend on interest from potential participants.
Workshop participants will participate in one of three types of working groups during the week.
- Traditional groups: There will be two research groups in the by-now-traditional WICA format, each with group leaders who have been recruited in advance of this announcement by workshop organizers.
- Proposed research groups: There will be three research groups whose group leaders are selected from among those who propose a research problem via the link above. Proposals may be made by a single mathematician or by a team of two. Proposers need not be senior mathematicians. They are expected to take the lead in getting the group started on the proposed problem during the workshop. However, because proposers will not necessarily be more senior than other group members, there is less of an expectation that they will serve as mentors within the group if the group chooses to continue the project beyond the week of the workshop. Because (parts of) these problem proposals will be posted publicly, we understand that people may wish to keep the statements of their problems somewhat vague. The most important information is the general topic of the problem and the background that would be required for someone to work on it.
- Research dialogue groups: There will be two groups, each with four to six participants, who will work together to learn background material on topics on which they are not yet experts. The goals in these groups will be to build working relationships and lay the foundation for future research collaborations. There is no expectation that these groups will continue beyond the week of the workshop itself.
In order to propose a research problem, please prepare a brief summary (~1/4 page to a page) of the problem itself and, roughly, of the background one would need to have in order to engage meaningfully with the problem. Please submit at most one research problem proposal.
In order to propose a dialogue topic, please choose a survey article, book chapter(s), research paper, or similar that you would like to study with others during the workshop week. If there is a topic that you would like to learn and a small family of references you would be happy to learn from, including all of the options that would be appealing to you is perfectly fine. If you want to propose more than one topic, please submit separate proposals. Please submit at most three dialogue topic proposals.
Funding is available through ICMS and from a gift from Jane Street Capital to cover participants’ local expenses. We are in the process of seeking sources of funding to defray the costs of participant travel; there is no guarantee that such funding will be obtainable. Additionally, there may be a 150 GBP registration fee.
If you have questions about the workshop or about proposal topics, please email the workshop organizers, Susan Cooper, Elena Guardo, Sema Güntürkün, and Patricia Klein.