 Hello, I'm Mike Douglas, the president and chairman of Friends of IHES. I hope you all enjoyed our 2021 Gala. We've had much to celebrate, the hiring of Lor San Remo, the first woman permanent professor at the IHES, and of course, many younger permanent professors hired in recent years. And this really shows the continued vibrancy of IHES better than anything else I could tell you. And it couldn't happen without the help of faithful friends, all of you. And we can also celebrate recognition of both the IHES as professors. For example, Thibault Dunlop won the Dirac Medal and several other medals last year. We all shared and celebrated Maryland's award of the Les Gendonneurs. The third fundraising campaign is going well, as Immanuel Holmah reported, the getting of the Gala. So this will be my last Gala as president of Friends of IHES, though I'll stay on the board. And I'm extremely happy that Maryland and Jim Simons are succeeding me. And I hope they'll lead the organization to new heights of success. I've left mostly to have more time for my own academic research, which now focuses on artificial intelligence, something which was the topic of our 2017 Gala, but which you've all constantly read about in the newspapers and which is having a greater and greater influence on our lives. And I've mostly been focusing on its applications to scientific research. And I'm also thinking ahead to the chance to write about some of the great scientific events. I've been fortunate enough to participate and watch. So let me make a few reflections, not just about Friends, but about the role of IHES in my life, which has really been a very important one. My first visit actually was back in 1981. My father was a mathematician, and he brought the family there as he completed a paper. And my first long visit was 1997, 1998, and that was extremely important for my career. I wrote a well-known paper with Alain Kahn and Albert Schwartz on non-commutative geometry. And I began discussions with Maxime Kahnsevich, which led to other famous works on what's called Pi Stability for some of you have heard of that. And we continued to come every summer from 1998 to 2008. My family and I and many of my fondest memories are of those visits, watching my kids grow up every summer, play with the children of the other visitors. So back then I hadn't really been much involved in philanthropy and thinking about how the IHES sustained itself. I actually had often given much of my travel reimbursements back to IHES, which is perhaps something that was noticed. I heard of Friends, I think, first in 2009. And I even gave a talk for Friends in 2011 in New York City on the topic of faster and light neutrinos, which was in the news then. And the audience, it seemed to go well. Jean-Pierre Boucagnon liked it. Jim complimented me after the talk. And perhaps because of this, in late 2012, when then-president Renaud Tietrae announced his abrupt departure, Jean-Pierre Boucagnon thought of me. And he probably, in fact, he had also heard that I had recently started a sabbatical year at RenTech. And Jean-Pierre asked if I would be willing to, and I quote from his email, do an interim period as a president of Friends, so that the structure does not suffer any technical blockage at a quite critical moment in the fundraising efforts. So I was happy to help out, and I accepted. And while that interim period has lasted almost nine years now, and it's been a great deal of fun, helping to plan and to organize events. Very successful. The symposium on honor of Pierre Deline in 2014. And of course, the Gala's 2013 mathematics mind of the earth. 2014 on the Intrepid Carrier with Charles Simone and Thibaut Delmour. 2015 on math and games of chance. 2017 in artificial intelligence and 2019 in game theory. And many of you have been to one or more of those and shared these great experiences. So it's been a lot of fun. And as I, you know, most fun things eventually do come to an end. But I look forward to, as I said, even greater triumphs under the leadership of the assignments. So let me thank many, many people involved. My fellow board members, it's always a pleasure to interact with them. I'd like to thank Bernard Sandunot, who started Friends of IHES back in 1999. I'd like to thank the IHES development team, especially Marie Kaya, who led it for many years when I came up to about a year ago. And then Claire Lance, who's taken over from her and has made extremely a great start, many others. And thank the Vera Khan team, the agency which has helped us organize and managed these Gala's, according to Cervilly, Catherine Courier, who did many of the early Gala's, Segalin, Miller, Samantha Walsh, and many others at Vera Khan. And I'd like to thank all of you for coming to our Gala for your constant support, which is really what's helped make the IHES the great place that it remains. So with that, thanks, continue to enjoy your evening. And I look forward to talking to all of you more.