Mathematicians Demand: Move the 2026 ICM Out of the United States

By Ila Varma, mathematician and one of the organizers of this movement.

On March 15th, we launched a petition to boycott the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Philadelphia in light of the belligerent violence arising from the United States escalating around the world. The International Mathematical Union (IMU) and other decision-makers, including nonprofit organizations like the Simons Foundation, are ultimately forcing our scholarly community to be complicit in the violent and ever-worsening domestic and foreign policy of the United States. We, along with these 2500+ signatories, are refusing to attend the 2026 ICM unless it is moved out of the United States.

Mathematics as a discipline can be thought of as one of many lenses in which to experience and study US imperialism. The United States has destroyed a mathematics center in Venezuela with airstrikes during the illegal kidnapping of President Maduro and First Comrade Flores, and initiated a brutal war targeting Iranian infrastructure and scientists, including Sharif University of Technology, the institution that produced the first female Fields Medalist, Maryam Mirzakhani.

Especially in light of the IMU’s decision to move the 2022 ICM out of Russia due to the invasion of Ukraine, the decision to keep the 2026 ICM in the US feels like a tacit approval of the United States’ increasingly imperialist actions. We believe that this sort of behavior by a state can only be effectively resisted by a broad movement acting collectively across different sectors of society in different parts of the world to reject American fascism in the ways each community is particularly in a position to do so. As mathematicians, we believe it is our role to highlight the dangers of continuing along a trajectory where science is increasingly influenced by American state and military interests (and, as a result, completely at odds with the pursuit of liberation, knowledge, and truth).

Sign the petition. Stand with the movement.