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Citing the U.S. government’s “unbridled hatred of immigrants,” a petition signed by more than 2,000 people from around the world is calling for a boycott of an international conference taking place in Center City in July.
The petition warns that foreign academics coming to Philadelphia for the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) are at risk of “harm and unlawful detention” by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
It also cites the war on Iran, the invasion of Venezuela, President Trump’s talk of annexing Greenland and other U.S. foreign policy actions in urging that the conference be relocated to another country or boycotted.
The situation recalls criticisms of the most recent previous congress in 2022, said Tarik Aougab, an associate professor of math at Haverford College who helped draft the petition. That meeting was scheduled to be held in St. Petersburg but was converted to a virtual conference in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The safety concerns, the travel concerns and the aggressive and belligerent nature of the state, at the time that the state is scheduled to host the conference, are all being triggered right now,” Aougab said. “For that reason, the only consistent policy would be to make a similar decision here.”
This year’s congress will be the first in the U.S. in 40 years. Organizers are hoping it will attract a record-breaking 6,000 or more mathematicians from around the world, said Jonathan Block, chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s math department and a member of the conference’s local organizing committee.
Block said it’s possible the petition will depress attendance somewhat, but he argued the issues it cites should instead motivate people to make the trip.
“The concern for the safety of the attendees from outside the United States, that seems like a legitimate concern,” he said. However, “the interest in boycotting is a little bit misplaced. The concerns that people have that are causing them to want to boycott the ICM for political reasons would probably be better served by actually having a successful conference in this country.”
What is the International Congress of Mathematicians?
The conference will take place July 23-30 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Center City. The ICM is held every four years and typically includes hundreds of lectures and short talks, along with exhibits, award ceremonies and social events. Fields Medals, often called the Nobel Prizes of mathematics, are awarded at ICMs.
“It is a time for mathematicians to come together and talk about what’s important in the field, take stock of the field and celebrate accomplishments,” Block said.
The congress gives them opportunities to learn about developments in areas outside their specialties, and provides local mathematicians a moment in the international spotlight, he said.
“The Philadelphia area is incredibly rich in terms of people who do mathematics, and the mathematics that’s done here,” he said.
He cited UPenn, Princeton, Temple, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford as some local standouts, as well as pharmaceutical companies that have quantitative biology teams and other firms with mathematicians.
The congress will also have a public festival that requires advance registration but is free to attend.
It will include an art exhibit called Mathemalchemy that aims to bring the “joy of discovering math” to children as well as exhibits from New York’s National Museum of Math and other presenters. There will be a talk about Emmy Noether, an acclaimed mathematician who fled Germany in the 1930s and taught at Bryn Mawr, and a sports analytics panel with staffers from the Eagles, Phillies, Sixers, Flyers and the Union.
“For so many people like me, who ended up going into math, our first brush with math was reading statistics about baseball,” Block said. “It’s really been a huge back and forth between mathematicians and sports.”
What led to the petition?
Aougab organized the petition with Ila Varma, an associate professor at the University of Toronto. They and other mathematicians had been discussing what visiting the U.S. looks like for people from different countries, including the 70-plus nations where it’s now “almost impossible” to get a U.S. travel visa, he said.
Some organizations have said they will not have an official presence at the congress. The Société Mathématique de France, for example, said it will not have a booth at the event. “Furthermore, the SMF remains fundamentally attached to the legacy of Benjamin Franklin… and condemns distrust of science and any attack on academic freedom,” the organization said.
“We thought that was great, and we thought that what was maybe missing from the conversation was the opportunity for individual mathematicians, not just professional societies, to voice their concerns about the potentially exclusionary reality of holding the biggest math conference in the world in the U.S. at this time,” Aougab said.
The petition describes the U.S. as “a country on the verge of martial law.” It mentions a U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing racial profiling by immigration officers, the killing of activists by ICE agents in Minneapolis, and the death of Parady La, a Philadelphia man who died after being detained by ICE in January.
Brazil’s main math society also said it won’t have a booth, although both French and Brazilian mathematicians may attend the congress. Germany’s main math organization voiced support for keeping the ICM in Philly, as did the European Mathematical Society and the American Mathematical Society.
Whatever ends up happening, the petition has already had a salutary effect for academics in Iran, Cuba, and other countries, Aougab said.
“Some of the people who are most impacted by the aggressive actions of our current government are reaching out to us and saying, ‘we feel seen, we feel heard by this,’ and we’ve started conversations with them that would never have started if we hadn’t done this,” he said.
How will attendance be affected?
The ICM is a medium-to-small meeting, with far fewer attendees than big public events like the Philadelphia Flower Show, which can draw 200,000 people, or conferences like a 2024 PHL Life Sciences event that attracted 12,000.
Bryna Kra, a Northwestern University professor who heads the ICM local organizing committee, has said the group hopes for 5,000 to 6,000 attendees, which would make it one of the best-attended congresses ever. About 1,800 people had signed up as of last week, she told Billy Penn.
The past few in-person ICMs in other cities drew 3,000 to 4,500 attendees, while the 2022 virtual congress hit its registration cap of 7,000.
U.S. scientific conferences broadly have been roiled by sharp shifts in federal funding and policy under the Trump administration, according to a January article in Science magazine. Officially, some reported modest declines in attendance last year and others saw no impact; anecdotally, some organizations may have seen steep drops that they declined to publicize, the article said.
In the case of the ICM, some of the mathematicians who signed the petition hadn’t been planning to attend anyway, while others are apparently still coming despite adding their names to the document.
“Until the registration is complete, it’s going to be really hard to know, but I am optimistic that it will be a really large and excellent gathering, with a lot of very interesting people there,” Kra said.
The congress could also get a boost from a broader predicted rebound in international travel to the U.S.
In 2025, the number of international visitors to Philadelphia fell 13.8%, led by a 23.3% plunge in Canadian travelers, according to the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau. Visits from Canada fell from 535,000 to about 412,000, representing a $50 million drop in spending year over year.
This year, however, the city expects a 4.5% increase in international visitors, including a 4.1% gain from Canada, according to data from the firm Tourism Economics provided by the visitors bureau. The increase will be supported in part by major global events such as the FIFA World Cup, the company said.
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