Pieter Kleer, former PhD student of CWI, has been awarded the Gijs de Leve Prize 2018-2020. He received the prize on 22 January 2021 on the occasion of the annual congress of the LNMB, the Dutch Network on the Mathematics of Operations Research. In awarding Kleer this prestigious prize, the jury recognized his PhD thesis as the 'best PhD thesis in in the area of Mathematics of Operations Research defended in the last three years'.
Kleer received the prize for his thesis ‘When Nash met Markov: Novel results for pure Nash equilibria and the switch Markov chain’, which was the result of his research at CWI under the guidance of Guido Schäfer and Lex Schrijver from CWI’s Networks & Optimization research group. Kleer defended his PhD thesis at VU Amsterdam in 2019 and graduated with honours ('cum laude').
The jury said: “Pieter Kleer has written two PhD-theses in one, both of exceptionally high quality and based on six papers all appearing in top venues”. This research has several application areas, like traffic. When drivers avoid certain highways to escape the risk of usual traffic jams, they can significantly increase the average travel time for everyone in the road network. In his thesis, Pieter Kleer developed unifying models to analyze the longer average travel times due to this behaviour.
Pieter Kleer is currently employed as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Algorithms and Complexity department at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik (MPII) in Saarbrücken, Germany. Before that he was a PhD student in the Networks and Optimization group at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, supervised by Guido Schäfer. His PhD position was part of the Networks project (https://www.thenetworkcenter.nl/). The Gijs de Leve Prize consists of ‘everlasting fame’ and 1000 euros. The prize is named after mathematician Gijs de Leve (1926-2009), who is considered the founder of operations research in the Netherlands.
More information:
- LNMB site
- Earlier winners of the Gijs de Leve Prize were: Sem Borst (1994-1996), Jos Sturm (1997-1999), Bert Zwart (2000-2002), Rene Sitters (2003-2005), Ton Dieker (2006-2008), Leo van Iersel (2009-2011), Arnoud den Boer (2012-2014) and Waard Romeijnders (2015-2017)
- CWI’s N&O group
- Pieter Kleer's current homepage
