Marianna Nagy from the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam won the Gyula Farkas Memorial Award 2011. The prize is annually awarded by the Hungarian János Bolyai Mathematical Society to young Hungarian mathematicians for significant applied mathematical research. The award ceremony took place on 16 December 2011 in Budapest. Nagy (1981) received the award for her research in the field of optimization. Since September 2011 she has been a postdoc researcher in the Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization (PNA1) research group at CWI.
Before Nagy came to CWI, she did her PhD research at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, where she investigated linear complementarity problems. These problems are used as models in many real-life applications, for instance in economy, mechanics, and structural design. After her PhD she became a postdoc researcher the Department of Econometrics and Operations Research of Tilburg University, where she studied semidefinite programming approximations of hard problems, such as the travelling salesman problem.
At CWI, Nagy investigates combinatorial and geometric aspects of semidefinite optimization techniques. “Due to the large number of applications, there is a real need for efficient algorithms to solve these problems”, she says. The goal is to analyze the quality of these approximations. Nagy’s research is funded by Lex Schrijver’s Spinoza Prize (2005).
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