The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 130

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Ed Bierstone
active participants in its scientific, educational, and outreach
activities.
The Fields Institute helps to transform the ways in which
mathematics is advanced and communicated by bringing
together people with great ideas to share. The period of
my tenure as Director was marked both by intense activity
and by major financial challenges. I remember several of
my colleagues joking that, on the occasion of the Fields
Institutes twenty-fifth anniversary, we would likely be toasting
its memory in a local bar! There were times when the
staff probably felt the workload was completely crazy—when
we were running three major programs at once, organizing
the Fields Medal Symposium and the Xenakis festival, and
at the same time arranging meetings with the provincial
government, the University of Toronto administration, the
Scientific Advisory Panel, and the Board of Directors.
The crazy times were among the periods I felt were the
most fun! I was fortunate to have the support and friendship
of Juris Steprans, Matthias Neufang, and Matheus Grasselli
as Deputy Directors, and of John Gardner, Janet Mason, and
Phillip Siller as the leaders of the Board. I tried to learn from
everybody and think I got considerable mileage from listening.
I had the good fortune that several of our funding initiatives
came to successful conclusions towards the end of my term,
with commitments by the Province of Ontario, NSERC, and
the NSF opening the way to a very bright future for the
Institute.
Fields Medal Symposium
The Fields Medal Symposium had its origin in an unsuccessful
bid by the Fields Institute as one of three finalists (together
with Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada,
Rio de Janeiro, and the Weierstrass Institute, Berlin) in a