Sophie Huiberts, now a PhD student at CWI, was one of the three nominees for the Graduate School of Natural Sciences Thesis Award 2018 at Utrecht University. She was nominated for her Master’s thesis ‘How Large is the Shadow? Smoothed Analysis of the Simplex Method’ in mathematics, which she finished earlier this year at Utrecht University. On 3 September 2018 the jury chose Matthias Aengenheyster as the winner for his thesis ‘Point of No Return and Optimal Transitions in CMIP5’. The third nominee was Bobby Vos.
The UU wrote about Sophie’s nomination: “Her work was to further develop the original and still most popular method for solving linear programs, the simplex method. According to the jury, Huiberts’ thesis represents work of very high quality and illustrates well her talents as a researcher. She has proven to be a very intelligent and talented researcher, and has surprised her supervisor more than once with her impressive performance.”
Daniel Dadush, researcher in the Networks and Optimization research group at CWI, says: “I am very proud of the work Sophie did in her thesis and her nomination for the Utrecht School of Natural Sciences Master's thesis prize is well-deserved. Her thesis significantly improves our understanding of why the simplex method, the most popular method for solving linear programs, works so well in practice. Beyond this nomination, Sophie recently presented a paper based on her thesis at this year's Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC 2018) in Los Angeles, one of the top two conferences in theoretical computer science. I am very fortunate that Sophie has chosen to pursue her PhD with me, and I am very excited to see where her research career takes her.”
Sophie Huiberts adds: “I am honoured to have been nominated for the prize. The nominees were close in quality, but there can only be one winner. In my PhD at the Networks and Optimization group of CWI, I will in part continue the research from my master thesis.”
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