Dion Gijswijt, former PhD student of Lex Schrijver, was nominated for the A.W. Tucker Prize by the Mathematical Programming Society. The jury announced this during the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming (ISMP) 2006 in Rio de Janeiro on 31 July. The Tucker Prize is awarded every three years for 'an outstanding paper or thesis solely authored by a student'. Gijswijt was one of the three international finalists for his thesis, called 'Matrix algebras and semidefinite programming techniques for codes'. He was seconded at CWI from 2002 until 2005.
Gijswijt studied error-correcting codes for CD players and other electronic data transfer. Due to noise or damage, small errors can occur when data is sent or saved. The investigated codes can repair small numbers of errors using redundancy in the data. Therefore, a CD with some scratches can still sound perfect. Dion Gijswijt studied the limits of the theoretically feasible quality of error-correcting codes.
