On November 10, 2025, the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences hostеd the event Atanasoff Memorial Day – a new initiative of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the International Center for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS-Sofia) at IMI-BAS.

The organizers’ ambition is to hold the Atanasoff Memorial Lecture Series every year, thus commemorating the life of John Vincent Atanasoff (1903–1995) – a computer pioneer, inventor of a model of an electronic digital computer and renowned as the “Bulgarian father of the electronic computer”. It aims to celebrate the intersection between mathematics, computation, and the sciences of complexity — the very domains that unite topology, geometry, and machine learning in the 21st century.

Each year, an internationally distinguished scientist is invited as the Atanasoff Lecturer to deliver a keynote lecture highlighting frontier ideas where mathematical structure meets computational innovation. The series provides an open platform for dialogue across fields: pure mathematics, physics, data science, and artificial intelligence. It also serves as a tribute to the scientific imagination of John Vincent Atanasoff, whose work laid the foundations of electronic computation.

The inaugural edition of the series took place at the International Center for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS-Sofia) at IMI-BAS, on November 10, 2025. The program includes topics from topology to machine learning, control, and data-driven modelling of complex systems.

This year, the keynote lecturer was Amaury Hayat, French mathematician and applied scientist, Professor at École des Ponts–Institut Polytechnique de Paris, working on control and stabilization of PDEs and on applications of artificial intelligence to mathematics.

Among other distinguished mathematicians who attended the first Atanasoff Memorial Day were:

  • Raphaël Douady, French mathematician and economist, PhD (1982, Paris VII) in Hamiltonian dynamics, former Frey Chair of Quantitative Finance at Stony Brook (SUNY) and Academic Director at LabEx ReFi, Co-founder and Research Director of Riskdata, with decades of work in chaos theory, systemic-risk modelling, polymodel theory and machine-learning methods in finance.
  • Carlos Simpson, American algebraic geometer, PhD form Harvard (1987) under Wilfried Schmid on Systems of Hodge Bundles and Uniformization, Research Director at CNRS, Université Côte d’Azur. His work includes non-abelian Hodge theory, higher categories, moduli spaces and computer-aided proof verification.
  • Yuri Tschinkel, Russian-German-American algebraic geometer, PhD from MIT (1992), Junior Fellow at Harvard Society of Fellows, Gauss Chair at Göttingen, Chair at Courant (NYU), and Director at the Simons Foundation. His research is in the field of rational points, birational geometry and the arithmetic of high-dimensional varieties.
  • Phillip A. Griffiths, American mathematician, Institute for Advanced Study (IAS Princeton). Renowned for foundational work in Hodge theory, algebraic geometry and differential geometry, as well as for his leadership in shaping modern mathematical institutions and research communities. For his outstanding contributions to the development of modern mathematics, for his exceptional role in fostering international collaborations with IMI–BAS, and for his efforts in strengthening the Institute’s position as a leading international research centre, in 2025 Prof. Griffiths was awarded the Medal with Ribbon of IMI–BAS.