SIAM Student Paper Prize for Lucas Slot

Lucas Slot (ETH Zürich), former PhD student of CWI, is one of the 2024 recipients of the SIAM Student Paper Prize. He received the prize for his paper, “Sum-of-Squares Hierarchies for Polynomial Optimization and the Christoffel--Darboux Kernel,” written while he was a student in the Networks and Optimization group at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam. SIAM is the international Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

The SIAM Student Paper Prize is awarded annually to the student authors of the most outstanding papers accepted by SIAM journals from the last three years. The two other recipients of the 2024 awards are Heather Cihak, University of Colorado Boulder, and Shu Liu, University of California, Los Angeles.

Lucas Slot earned his bachelor's degrees in mathematics and computer science from the University of Amsterdam (2016), and his master's degree in mathematics from the University of Bonn (2018). He received his PhD from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica and Tilburg University (2022). Earlier this year, Slot won the Stieltjes Prize for his PhD research at CWI and in 2022 the KWG PhD Prize for the same research. Currently, he is a postdoc in the group of David Steurer at ETH Zürich. His main research interest is in polynomial optimization and semidefinite programming approaches to hard problems in optimization, discrete geometry, combinatorics, statistics, and data science.

SIAM News posed the following questions to Lucas Slot:

Q: Why are you excited to receive the award?

A: I am very honoured to receive the SIAM Student Paper Prize. This award is a great recognition of the community's interest in my field of research, and my contributions to it. It motivates me to continue working in this direction.

Q: Could you tell us about the research that won you the award?

A: My research focuses on polynomial optimization problems, where one is tasked to minimize a polynomial under polynomial constraints. These problems are generally very difficult to solve exactly. However, they can be approximated up to arbitrary precision by a sequence of semidefinite programs of increasing size. In this paper, I study the quality of these approximations. In particular, I am able to unify ideas from several other works on this topic into a single framework. A primary motivation was to present a clear method which will hopefully be useful to other researchers in the future.

Q: What does your work mean to the public?

A: Polynomial optimization shows up in real-life problems in a variety of areas, such as finance, robotics, data science, and energy distribution. Understanding the methods we use to tackle polynomial optimization problems at a theoretical level allows us to apply them safely and effectively in practice.

Q: What does being a member of SIAM mean to you?

A: I am grateful to SIAM for fostering a diverse community of pure, applied, and industrial mathematicians. Discussions with other researchers at SIAM conferences have been a major source of inspiration for me and have led to fruitful collaborations. SIAM journals and conferences have also been one of the main ways for me to disseminate my research.

The winning scientific paper was published in SIAM Journal on Optimization, Vol. 32 (4), pp. 2612- 2635 (2022). 

Source: https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/2024-july-prize-spotlight#Slot

The prizes were awarded at the online event of the 2024 SIAM Annual Meeting.