Prof. Stephen M. Watt, gave a lecture titled “Mathematical Knowledge at Scale” at AMSS on 22, March 2018.  

The world's largest organism is a clonal colony of quaking aspen in Utah, with some 40,000 trunks spanning 43 hectares and massing an estimated 6,000 metric tons. This is not a forest of individuals, but a single, living organism. We may think of mathematical knowledge in the same way.It is the goal of the International Mathematical Knowledge Trust (IMKT) to develop a global digital mathematics library, not as a comprehensive collection of individual articles, but as an integrated knowledge base, both for human readers and machine services.This talk presented the goals of the IMKT, the direction of its first steps, challenges to be overcome, and a long-term picture of scalable mathematical knowledge integration.  

Prof. Stephen M. Watt is dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo.