Six areas add up to infomaths

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the London Mathematical Society have launched a three-year initiative to reconnect computer science to its roots in mathematics.

The Mathematics for Information Technology (Mathfit) initiative is the result of detailed consultations between the EPSRC and the society which have been going on for more than a year.

Six areas have been identified as priorities for future work. They embrace topics of long-standing research interest such as algorithms, concurrent systems and the semantics of programming languages and some, like neural computation, which have attracted mathematical attention relatively recently.

With the academic and comercial sectors of the Internet growing explosively, the EPSRC is keen to support research related to networking and telecommunications.

The highly mathematical subject of cryptology, for example, is vital to information security.

No new money has been set aside for Mathfit research, and proposals must go through the EPSRC's peer-reviewed process where they will compete with bids from other branches of engineering and science. But Pounds 30,000 is available to fund Mathfit summer schools and workshops. Details are available from the Web site at http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/progs/it_cs/mfitcall.htm