Welcome to the Vietnam-USA Joint Mathematical Meeting 2019, under the patronage of the Vietnamese Mathematical Society and the American Mathematical Society.

I'm Brian Boe, Professor at the University of Georgia, USA and Associate Secretary for the American Mathematical Society. It's a great pleasure to welcome you all on behalf of the AMS. I want to spend a moment saying a few words about our Society.

We are the largest mathematical society in the world, with approximately 30,000 members from 127 countries.

Our two main missions for the 21st century are to Advance Research and Create Connections.

Advancing Research includes supporting conferences, publishing journals and books, and making research more accessible via the Mathematical Reviews database and MathSciNet.

Creating Connections includes running conferences, providing travel grants to international meetings like the International Congress of Mathematicians and the Mathematical Congress of the Americas, and supporting a Visiting Lecturer Program.

One of our main objectives, which falls under both missions, is to cooperate with mathematical societies in other countries to co-organize and co-sponsor joint international meetings such as this one.

This is the first joint meeting between the VMS and the AMS. I hope it will not be the last! So far the planning process has been a great experience--it has been wonderful working with the many representatives from the VMS, the Vietnam Institute for Advanced Studies in Mathematics (VIASM), the Program Committee, the Local Organizing Committee, and the International Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and Education (ICISE). I really appreciate the many hours everyone has spent planning this meeting. I also want to thank the many student volunteers from Hanoi, Quy Nhon, and Ho Chi Minh City for their indispensable help with logistics during the meeting itself.

I think we have a fantastic meeting in store for us. There will be 6 Invited Addresses, 3 each from the USA and Vietnam. We have 13 parallel sessions on different areas of mathematics, ranging from pure to applied. Each session has at least one organizer from the US and one from Vietnam, and I want to thank these organizers for their hard work, too. There will be a forum on Math for Industry late Tuesday afternoon at Quy Nhon University, and a poster session for young mathematicians on Wednesday before the banquet. According to the printed program, there are approximately 325 registered participants for this meeting!

I also thank the sponsors for their support: the National Program for the Development of Mathematics, Vingroup Big Data Institute, and ICISE.

I want to mention what a beautiful setting we are in here at ICISE, surrounded by the ocean, river, and mountains, in the lovely Binh Dinh Province on the coast of central Vietnam. It's really an idyllic setting for talking about mathematics.

In conclusion, I wish everyone a stimulating and productive conference. I hope that you will meet new collaborators and start new joint projects, and I hope that this will be the beginning of a new mathematical synergy between our two nations.