The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 95

Public Resources
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During the years subsequent to 2000, the funding sources
for the Institute stabilized, the number of its scientific
activities grew, and the international level increased. Indeed,
it is quite an accomplishment for the Institute to have risen to
the stature of such institutions as the Mathematical Sciences
Research Institute (MSRI), Berkeley; the Isaac Newton
Institute, Cambridge; and the Institut Henri Poincaré (IHP),
Paris. These are our sister and competitor institutes.
Fields played a role in my own research program by offering
support for numerous activities, some larger some smaller,
that my colleagues and I sponsored. The biggest one was
the full year program on partial differential equations during
2003–04, about which the organizers are still occasionally
receiving positive comments. Following this, we ran a series of
annual Young Mathematicians Conferences, starting at Fields
but making a point of holding them at the other Canadian
mathematical sciences institutes as well. The specific issue
that we wanted to illustrate was the co-operation that exists
among the Canadian institutes—a point not always clearly
articulated in the past.
In addition, we sponsored many other meetings and
workshops in a variety of formats. The flexibility of the
Institute that allows organizers to design their own activity,
always vetted by the Scientific Advisory Panel, of course, is
a definite plus. To illustrate this level of flexibility, among a
variety of week-long workshops and symposia over the years,
we once held a three-day workshop over a long weekend
which could be better classified as a work shop. That is, we
invited eight researchers associated with a National Science
Foundation (NSF) Focused Research Group to meet at Fields,
sit in one of the seminar rooms over the long weekend, and
work together on our collaboration—on ocean waves and their
numerous mathematical models.
We hosted only one talk d