118 Sheila Embleton
affairs. This was also the time period when I first heard of the Fields Institute and learned about its activities— all prompted by a budget entry in the Department of Mathematics budget, paying fees to the Institute. What a mundane way to first learn about such a wonderful Institute! It was also during this time that I began to realize that probably the most important thing to facilitate the research of mathematicians was other mathematicians( and blackboards and chalk— neatly embedded in the Fields logo). Research budgets consisted almost entirely of expenses for travel to work with other mathematicians, or to host visiting mathematicians, or for post-doctoral fellows with whom to work.
Half a dozen years later, as Vice-President Academic and Provost, I started to become more involved with the Fields Institute, again through budget initially, but also because of meeting notices and invitations to events, which I accepted and attended. It did not take long to see what a thriving enterprise Fields is, and( since mathematicians mostly need other mathematicians) how important the Institute is for mathematical research not just for the principal sponsoring universities but also for Canada. And all this brought me back in contact with some of the people who had been my professors in my student days at the University of Toronto. My nine years as Vice-President Academic and Provost also brought me face to face again with the issues of women in the STEM disciplines in general, and with some worthwhile initiatives from NSERC to try to remedy these issues. I was also responsible for merging the( three) mathematics units on our Keele campus into one unit, to be housed in the Faculty of Science, which again kept me in close contact with mathematicians, albeit on purely administrative matters. Further, this was also the time of a large change in the Ontario high school curriculum( both the change from 5 years to 4 years of high school, but also other re-orientations in the mathematics curriculum). As Chair of