AFTERWORD
In the course of its study the committee returned several times to the question of how to maximize the impact of its work and how to measure that impact. To achieve maximum influence, leaders of the mathematical sciences community and researchers at the interface of the mathematical sciences and chemistry were invited to supply input to the committee to ensure that a broad range of experience and expertise was sampled. Emphasis was put on writing a report that would appeal both to mathematical scientists and to theoretical/computational chemists. A dissemination effort including electronic and hard-copy publication was planned to make the report widely available and to convey its recommendations to a variety of community leaders and policymakers.
Because the promise of interdisciplinary work between the mathematical sciences and theoretical/computational chemistry is so great, the committee suggests that the cognizant boards of the National Research Council (NRC) invite testimony five years hence from community leaders and federal program managers to assess whether progress has been made in achieving this promise. It would be worth attempting to gauge specifically whether the present report helped to bridge the stylistic and linguistic gap between the two fields addressed, especially since future NRC studies on interdisciplinary topics might benefit from the committee's experiences.