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My period as President of the Bernoulli Society is approaching its end; at the Lisbon ISI session in August, Jean Jacod will take over.
The most important event during the period 2005-07 has probably been our strengthened collaboration with the IMS and our active participation in restructuring—and hopefully—reinvigorating the ISI.
The ISI is a fantastic organisation, one of the world's oldest international scientific bodies, spanning a member spectrum from pure probabilists all the way to opinion pollers and official statisticians.
With the breakthrough of probabilistic approaches all over science, our old liaison with official statistics has become somewhat overshadowed. But old acquaintance should not be forlorn. Our relation to government and administration is unique among the exact sciences. Official statistics remains a platform for rational discourse about politics, and thus, a prerequisite for democracy. Its reliability and proper analysis is indeed a worthy task for statistical science that should not be left to people without good training in mathematical statistics.
The ISI is both a meeting place between scientific and official statistics and a framework for highly specialised Bernoulli activities, as much in the forefront of science as any other Bernoulli meeting.
Come to Lisbon and see for yourself.
Our good relationship to the IMS has become even better. IMS has taken over publishing the Bernoulli, and we collaborate on several electronic publication matters, as well as on our world congresses.
After Lisbon 2007, there follows the Bernoulli–IMS World Congress in Singapore 2008.
Finally, stochastics has not only asserted its importance for science at large and kept its role in official statistics and social science. It has also scored successes as a branch of mathematics, some of the most prestigious awards in this field, Field Medals and now the Abel Prize given to colleagues of us. We congratulate Andrei Okounkov, Wendelin Werner, Ragu Varadhan, and Kiyosi Ito, who were awarded the Gauss Prize by the International Mathematical Union.
Peter Jagers
President