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Географический анализ докладчиков ICM2014:


In case you have not looked at the tables yet: the three countries in which the most speakers were born are France (30 speakers), the Soviet Union (27) and the United States (26); the next countries in the list, far behind, are Germany and the UK (12 each). This should be completely unsurprising to anybody within the mathematical community. Then we have Italy and China, each at 9, and Hungary at 8. (South America – indeed all of Latin America – has a grand total of 7, including 3 from Argentina and 2 from Brazil.)

The birth-to-PhD and PhD-to-work charts show that the US acts as a very strong attractor for prospective doctoral students (58.5 speakers born elsewhere got their doctoral degrees in the US, and no speakers born in the US got their PhDs elsewhere; here, fractional numbers indicate shared positions/studentships and the like), but not as a workplace (28.5 speakers left after getting their PhD in the States, and 21.5 moved to the States after getting their PhD elsewhere). France works almost as a closed system at the educational level (only 3 speakers born in France got their PhDs elsewhere, and 3.5 did the inverse move) and as a very mild attractor as far as jobs are concerned (8.5 foreign PhDs moved to France, including 4 from the US, and 4 French PhDs moved out of France). As for the Soviet Union – 23.5 out of 27 speakers born there live outside the successor states (13 of them in the US), 10 moved out already to get their PhDs (6 of them in the US), and nobody not born in the Soviet Union currently works in the successor states. Only 3 of the 16 speakers born in Eastern-Europe-minus-USSR got their PhD there, and only one of them works in Eastern Europe now (a Hungarian in Hungary). Again, the overall picture agrees roughly with what conventional wisdom would have expected.

As for Latin America – 7 speakers were born there, and 3.5 left for the US to their PhDs, with the others staying in their home countries (Brazil and Argentina); 2 work in the US, four work in their home countries (again, Brazil and Argentina) and one works in France (myself). Two speakers born outside South America now live there; both are former Soviet citizens working in Brazil. Of course, the numbers are so low that one should take care not to see patterns that are not really there. (The same goes for Africa – there are two speakers from there, one working in Africa and one in the States.)