FAS hosted an international mathematics conference. Around 150 experts attended

Algebra, statistics, and quantum computing. These are just some of the topics covered in the main lectures at the CSASC 2026 conference. This year, it was being hosted by the Faculty of Applied Sciences at UWB. Mathematicians from twenty countries attended the meeting.

The Faculty of Applied Sciences of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen (FAS UWB) was hosting the CSASC international mathematics conference in the first week of February. Participants could have joined lectures and fourteen workshops. "The range of topics is quite broad, with the workshops covering various areas of mathematics, from algebra and analysis to statistics, stochastics, group theory, graph theory, spectral theory, and even modeling of the Earth's gravitational field or quantum computing," said Jan Pospíšil from the Department of Mathematics at FAS UWB on behalf of the organizers. According to him, the lecturers are European leaders in their fields.

He considers the opportunity to host a conference of this scale to be a significant event not only for the department and the faculty, but also for the entire university. "We are proud to host a conference with a long tradition. The sharing of knowledge and cooperation between the experts that are present here is an integral part of this meeting," said Miroslav Lávička, rector of the University of West Bohemia, summarizing the importance of the conference for the university.

However, the meeting is also very meaningful for the Union of Czech Mathematicians and the Czech Mathematical Society (CMS). It was the CMS that initiated these professional gatherings in 2005. At the instigation of Jan Kratochvíl from CMS and Carles Casacuberta from the Catalan Mathematical Society, the two organizations jointly hosted the first Czech-Catalan mathematical conference in Prague. When mathematical societies from Slovenia, Austria, and Slovakia joined, the conference was held for the first time under the name CSASC in 2010. The palindromic abbreviation is formed from the initial letters of the English names of these countries. Individual countries now take turns organizing the conferences.

"This was followed by conferences in Krems in 2011, Koper in 2014, and Bratislava in 2018. After a long break, the event returned to the Czech Republic in 2026. The conference has grown to five days, and the number of sections has risen to 14. We may be small in size, but we are not alone," added the current president of the CMS, Luboš Pick. At the same time, he admitted that further expansion of the organizing base is possible, but the palindromic acronym is mandatory.