Sophie Huiberts, former PhD student of CWI, won the Gijs de Leve Prize 2020-2023, which is awarded every three years for the best PhD thesis in Mathematics of Operations Research during that period. It is awarded by LNMB, the Dutch national network for operations research. Sophie Huiberts is the first woman to get this prize. In her PhD research she gained new mathematical insights on popular optimization methods. Huiberts: “These have many applications: from planning baseball tournaments to managing flight plans, from factory processes to collecting garbage”.
Impressive research
Floske Spieksma said in the laudation of the jury: “The committee is enormously impressed that Sophie managed to make breakthrough progress on so-called smooth analysis of the simplex method (…). It shows scientific courage to tackle such a notorious problem at such a young age (…). She improved her master results in her thesis, thereby beating various recent bounds from the literature proved by eminent scientists”. Apart from other scientific results the jury also mentioned that “Sophie has a very transparant and attractive writing style”.
Sophie Huiberts added: “I feel honoured to receive this prize. The previous winners are some of the biggest names in Dutch operations research.” On her website she writes: “To me the best part about being a scientist is the fact that I am sometimes the first person who finds the solution to a particular problem, the first person ever to know a particular fact”.
