International Congress of Mathematicians

Each congress is memorialized by a printed set of Proceedings recording academic papers based on invited talks intended to be relevant to current topics of general interest.

[6] The organizers included such prominent mathematicians as Luigi Cremona, Felix Klein, Gösta Mittag-Leffler, Andrey Markov, and others.

[7] The congress was attended by 208 mathematicians from 16 countries, including more than 100 from Switzerland or Germany, around 20 from each of France, Italy, and Austria-Hungary, 13 from the Russian Empire and 7 from the US.

[9] At the 1904 ICM Gyula Kőnig delivered a lecture where he claimed that Georg Cantor's famous continuum hypothesis was false.

For the number of n, corresponding to the just opened International Congress of Mathematicians, we have the inequality 7 ≤ n ≤ 9; unfortunately our axiomatic foundations are not sufficient to give a more precise statement”.

[10] For the 1950 ICM in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Laurent Schwartz, one of the Fields Medalists for that year, and Jacques Hadamard, both of whom were viewed by the U.S. authorities as communist sympathizers, were only able to obtain U.S. visas after the personal intervention of President Harry Truman.

Following the end of World War I, the Allied Powers established in 1919 in Brussels the International Research Council (IRC).

The 1924 ICM was originally scheduled to be held in New York, but had to be moved to Toronto after the American Mathematical Society withdrew its invitation to host the congress, in protest against the exclusion rule.

However, in a famous episode, a few days before the end of the 1950 ICM, the congress' organizers received a telegram from Sergei Vavilov, President of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

The telegram thanked the organizers for inviting Soviet mathematicians but said that they are unable to attend "being very much occupied with their regular work", and wished success to the congress's participants.

[8]: 149–150  Vavilov's message was seen as a hopeful sign for the future ICMs and the situation improved further after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953.

In 1957 the USSR joined the International Mathematical Union and the participation in subsequent ICMs by the Soviet and other Eastern Bloc scientists returned to more normal levels.

[4] Grigory Margulis, who was awarded the Fields Medal at 1978 ICM in Helsinki, was not granted an exit visa and was unable to attend the 1978 congress.