Honourable mention Christiaan Huygens Prize for Lucas Slot

On Wednesday evening 16 October, the Christiaan Huygens Science Prize 2024 was awarded to Jan Willem van Ittersum for his PhD dissertation. The other two nominees for this prize were Lucas Slot and Rosa Schwarz, who both received an honourable mention. Slot (who is now a post-doc researcher at ETH Zürich) did his PhD research in CWI’s Networks & Optimization group and defended his dissertation ‘cum laude’ at Tilburg University in 2022.

Statue

Jan-Willem van Ittersum was awarded the prize for his dissertation ‘Partitions and quasimodular forms; variations on the Bloch-Okounov theorem’. He received the prize – 10 thousand euros and a bronze statue of Christiaan Huygens – from Minister Bruins of Education, Culture and Science, during a festive gathering in Voorburg. The jury, chaired by Eric Opdam (UvA), was "deeply impressed by the quality and innovative contribution of Van Ittersum’s dissertation to the field of mathematics". Jan-Willem van Ittersum is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cologne and did his PhD research at Utrecht University.

Honourable mentions

Two researchers received honourable mentions: Rosa Schwarz and Lucas Slot.

Rosa Schwarz did her PhD research at Leiden University and received her PhD degree for her thesis ‘Logarithmic approach to the double ramification cycle’. The jury found her dissertation "very strong in terms of mathematical content".

Lucas Slot, at the time PhD student at CWI, obtained his PhD degree in Tilburg on 30 September 2022 for his PhD thesis: ‘Asymptotic Analysis of Semidefinite Bounds for Polynomial Optimization and Independent Sets in Geometric Hypergraphs’. The jury was very impressed by this dissertation, which "clearly explained complex material". The jury said: "What is also striking about Slot's work is the mathematical breadth. Methods from very diverse areas of mathematics are combined to arrive at the results."
Earlier, Slot received the Stieltjes Prize 2022-2023, the 2022 KWG PhD Prize and the SIAM Student Paper Prize 2024 for this research.

About the Christiaan Huygens Science Prize

The Christiaan Huygens Science Prize rewards a young researcher who has made an innovative contribution to space science, mathematics or physics in a PhD dissertation. The award has been presented annually since 1998. In 2024, the focus was on mathematics. The Christiaan Huygens Prize Foundation organizes the award ceremony, which is made possible by sponsors. The jury is composed annually and supported by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

More information

• Christiaan Huygens Prize (in Dutch)
• Personal website Lucas Slot
• CWI's Networks and Optimization (N&O) research group

Header picture: Lucas Slot, nominee of the Christiaan Huygens Prize 2024, with one of his PhD supervisors, Monique Laurent (CWI & Tilburg University).