ICM'98

Information for Invited Speakers

Preparation of Abstracts and Proceedings Manuscripts

See the web page

http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/ICM98

Deadline for abstracts submission is May 1, 1998.
Deadline for submission of proceedings manuscripts is July 1, 1998.

Facilities

The Plenary Lectures will be given in the lecture hall H 105 of the TU Berlin. It offers room for 1200 persons. At least one additional lecture hall will be linked via video to this presentation so that in total an audience of more than 2000 persons can be reached. The 45-minute Lectures will be given in several of the larger lecture halls at TU Berlin. These rooms have seating capacities from several hundred up to over one thousand persons so that it will not be possible to use blackboards. All lecture halls will be equipped with two overhead projectors, screens and microphones. The overhead projector is the most effective method of presentation in a large auditorium or lecture hall.

If you need other audio-visual equipment for your talk, such as video beamer, slide or multiscan projectors, please contact the organizers before May 1, 1998. At all times a member of the ICM'98 staff will be available in the lecture hall to help you in the operation of the audio-visual equipment. We regret that simultaneous translation of lectures cannot be provided by ICM'98.

Preparing Your Lecture

Both the General Assembly and the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union as well as ICM Program Committees have repeatedly emphasized that Plenary and Invited Lectures should be comprehensible to a wide spectrum of mathematicians. Keep in mind how much mathematics has grown and how hard it is for specialists in different fields to communicate. Therefore, please,

-

Avoid unnessecary jargon and define key terms briefly.

-

Use many examples to motivate and illustrate definitions and main results.

-

Avoid exceeding the level of understanding of the average listener in your audience.

To improve the quality of the lecture in general and in order to make the best use of the projectors, the speaker is advised to heed the following suggestions:

-

Practice your speech, timing yourself to ensure that important points are not rushed and ample time is left for a summarizing conclusion.

-

Make an effort not to read through the talk too rapidly. Allow about three minutes per transparency.

-

Avoid distracting the audience by continually turning around to look at the screen. Use a pencil or a felt pen to point to a particular spot on your transparency and the shadow of the pen will show on the screen. Be sure, however, to glance at the screen when placing a new transparency on the projector to ensure its proper placement.

-

Keep your shoulder out of the way. If it is lighted by the projector, it is blocking the screen.

-

There will be two overhead projectors, make use of both.

-

Prepare most of the material to be projected in advance. For one thing this makes for a better typography and, second, the audience will be less distracted by your fiddling around with felt pens of various colors.

-

Use characters not less then 1.2 cm (1/2 inch) in height. Thus on a transparency there should be at most 12 lines with at most 25 characters per line.

-

Avoid erasures as much as possible, to prevent the occurence of smudgy images.

-

Use a variety of colors only if each color means something in the overall structure of your talk. Do not use yellow for text, formulas or lines in diagrams.

-

Under no circumstances lay a typewritten page copied 1:1 on the overhead projector.

Please send suggestions and corrections to: helmberg@zib.de
Last modified: February 17, 1998