This must be a tough challenge. You are given a bottle of precious Single Malt Whiskey, you are allowed to hold it and to look at it for one minute and then you have to give it away again— for another 9 years and three months to be precise. Norbert Holtkamp, Hiroshi Matsumoto and Eisuke Tada will only get to see their farewell presents again in November 2019, when ITER will launch into what Gary Johnson called "the biggest celebration in the history of the project": First Plasma.

It was up to the Deputy Director-General to lead the farewell ceremony for the three people that are about to leave the ITER Organization. Eisuke Tada, the former Head of the ITER Office of Central Integration, who has been involved in the ITER project ever since the early days of the ITER Conceptual Design Activities, is "leaving the Organization, but not the project", as he stressed. He will be working for the Japanese Domestic Agency JADA from now on. Hiroshi Matsumoto, formerly heading the Office of the Director-General and also involved in fusion and the ITER project for decades, is moving to Rokkasho, Japan, the site where the Broader Approach is taking shape.

And finally it was up to Norbert Holtkamp, the former Principal Deputy Director-General of the ITER project, to say "au revoir" to the assembled ITER team. After a five year excursion into the field of fusion, the accelerator physicist is moving back to his place of origin to take over responsibilities at the Stanford University. "Keep your goal in mind", Norbert Holtkamp said, "it is a goal worthwhile working for. Bon voyage!"

Marina, Alexia, Véronique, Anaïs and Sylvie are part of the newly established "Joint Visit Team" responsible for the organization of visits on the ITER work site. The team has just moved into their new office in JWS 3. The Team develops visit programmes that are adapted to the visitor's or group of visitors' wishes and to the operational constraints on the worksite.

In order to provide an even more efficient service, ITER Organization, Agence Iter France and Fusion of Energy (the European Domestic Agency responsible for the construction of 39 buildings and technical areas on the ITER site in Cadarache) have decided to join forces and create this shared structure.

The Joint Visit Team is now geared to deal with the thousands-plus visits requests that the three organizations receive every month.

For any inquiry or site tour, please contact the new office directly under Tel : + 33 4 42 17 46 92.

There is actually no Nobel Prize in mathematics. There is, however, an international award which is universally recognized as its equivalent: the Fields Medal, which is awarded every four years by the International Mathematics Union (IMU).

The most prestigious prize a mathematician can receive, the Fields Medal gives recognition and encouragement to younger (under 40) scientists who have made a major contribution to their field of research.

On 19 August in Hyderabad, India, where the IMU had convened, French mathematician Cédric Villani, 37, was one of four 2010 Fields Medal laureates — two Frenchmen, one Israeli and one Russian.

A full professor at the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon and the director of the Paris Institut Henri Poincaré, Villani has been praised for "providing a deep mathematical understanding of a variety of physical phenomena."

Aside from his passion for classical music and spiders, which explain his romantic poet look and the large spider brooch he wears, there is nothing this flamboyant young man loves more than equations.

One of his favourites is the Vlasov equation: a three-line long list of numbers and symbols that can describe, among other things, the behaviour of particles in a plasma or the movements of stars in a galaxy.

"I work at the extreme theoretical end of ITER", said Villani in a recent interview for French daily Le Figaro. To Newsline, he explains: "I am not directly involved in the project, but in trying to get a better understanding of the equation's properties I can bring a contribution... a modest one, certainly, but every contribution is valuable. I strongly believe in ITER and that interview in a national daily was an opportunity for me to advertise the project..."

Villani's theoretical work will help those working in "numerical analysis" to develop algorithms, which, in turn will be used to optimize computational models of plasma behaviour.

Over the past decades, many prominent mathematicians have pointed out that a sharp mathematical understanding of equations governing physical phenomena is a key to the design of accurate numerical recipes.

A theoretician who may appear to the layman as lost in abstraction, Villani feels it is "important to be anchored in reality." Reality meaning, in his case, the frenzied agitation of particles in a plasma and the majestic motion of stars in faraway galaxies.