Brief history: Since 1946, when the Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts was founded, the talks in both mathematics and mechanics were presented at the Institute’s Council regularly until 1961. A seminar that originated from the Council is the Mathematics Colloquium (initially the Mathematical Analysis Colloquium, and then the Theoretical Mathematics Colloquium). The Chairmen of these seminars / Mathematics Colloquia were Borivoje Rašajski, Đuro Kurepa, Stanimir Fempl, Slaviša Prešić, Žarko Mijajlović, Bogoljub Stanković, Rade Živaljević, and Stevan Pilipović.

Aim and scope: The Mathematics Colloquium is a general mathematics seminar, the role of which is to organise talks aimed at a broad audience, including young mathematicians in particular. Along with the Mechanics Colloquium and the Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Colloquium, it is responsible for creating the scientific programme at the Mathematical Institute tailored for all mathematical centres in Serbia.

Recent activities: During the last five years, 153 talks were delivered at the Colloquium. This included the talks of four Serbian mathematicians who formerly participated as invited speakers at International Congresses of Mathematicians: Stevo Todorčević (May 2016), Ilijas Farah (May 2017), Nataša Šešum (September 2017) and Vladimir Marković (May 2019). The following foreign speakers were guests at the Colloquium: Anton Zorič (April 2016), Herbert Edelsbrunner (May 2016), Theodore Popelensky (May 2017), Jordan Stoyanov (October 2017), Blagovest Sendov (November 2017), Keith Devlin (February 2018), Bernd Sturmfels (December 2018), Dilip Raghavan (February 2019) and Vladimir Manuilov (June 2019). Due to the Covid 19 pandemic, last year’s activities were relatively scarce.

The Mathematics Colloquium is a co-founder of the series "Mihailo Petrović Alas’ Lectures", whose aim is to promote young Serbian mathematicians partly educated abroad by offering them an opportunity to spread this knowledge among their colleagues in Serbia. The first invited speaker of this series was Luka Milićević, who delivered a one-semester course Additive Combinatorics (in spring 2019).

Future activities: The Colloquium plans to organise a series of talks to present the work of mathematicians from the neighbouring countries.