Book excerpt: This volume contains the proceedings of the First Mathematical Congress of the Americas, held from August 5-9, 2013, in Guanajuato, México. With the participation of close to 1,000 researchers from more than 40 countries, the meeting set a benchmark for mathematics in the two continents. The papers, written by some of the plenary and invited speakers, as well as winners of MCA awards, cover new developments in classic topics such as Hopf fibrations, minimal surfaces, and Markov processes, and provide recent insights on combinatorics and geometry, isospectral spherical space forms, homogenization on manifolds, and Lagrangian cobordism, as well as applications to physics and biology.