The Erlang Prize is to honour the best researcher under the age of 36 who has contributed significantly to applied probability. Zwart is the first person outside the United States to win this prize.
Mathematician Bert Zwart from the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica received the Erlang Prize last week from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
Zwart received the prize for his outstanding contributions to several areas in the interface of applied probability, computer science, and communication networks. Still in the United States he lets us know how proud he is: "The list of previous winners is impressive. I am honoured to win this prize as the first person not employed by an American institute."
The Erlang Prize was awarded during the INFORMS conference in Washington. The jury praised Zwart for his contributions to the field. Especially mentioned were the development of large-buffer asymptotics in communication networks and delay asymptotics for scheduling disciplines. Zwart and his coauthors developed new tools for obtaining the exact large-buffer asymptotics for fluid queues fed by a superposition of on-off sources with heavy-tailed activity periods, solving some key open problems in this area. In analysing delay asymptotics, Zwart and his coauthors broke new ground to obtain delay asymptoics for queues with heavy tailed job size distributions; such distributions are common in a variety of contexts such as batch jobs, Web documents, FTP file transfers, supercomputing jobs, and Internet flow durations.
Curriculum Vitae
Bert Zwart did his PhD research at CWI and the Eindhoven University of Technology, where he obtained his doctorate in 1997. For this research he received the Applied Probability Trust Award in 2001, the ASML prize in 2002, and the Gijs de Leve prize for best thesis in Operations Research. After one postdoc year at INRIA (France), Zwart worked at the Eindhoven University of Technology as senior lecturer, and at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta as associate professor. Since October 2008 he is a Vidi Fellow.
Erlang Prize
The Erlang Prize is named after the prize winning Danish mathematician Agner Krarup Erlang (1878-1929), who became interested in probability theory at the beginning of last century. He performed research for the telephone company in Copenhagen and discovered a formula enabling telephone companies in various countries to start computating things like queueing times. The Erlang Prize is awarded every two years by the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS. Apart from a plaque it involves one thousand dollars.
More information about the Erlang Prize: http://www.informs.org/article.php?id=189
