Stieltjes Prize Award 2021-2022
Day 2 (April 12) @ 14:00 – 14:45
The jury for the Stieltjes Prize met on 8 December 2022 to award the prize for the best mathematical dissertation published in the academic year 2021-2022. A total of 74 dissertations were assessed. The jury was impressed by the high level of the research performed. The quality of no less than 7 theses was such that winning the prize would be deserved. Hence difficult choices had to be made. After the first round of discussion, 4 dissertations remained, all of them of impressive quality and great originality. After an extensive second round of discussion, two dissertations remained. Both of these are of extraordinary quality, but otherwise they are rather different. The jury therefore decided to award the Stieltjes Prize to Freek Witteveen (University of Amsterdam) and Sophie Huiberts (CWI and Utrecht University).
Freek Witteveen (University of Copenhagen)
The mathematics of tensor network quantum states
Many-body quantum states suffer from a dimensionality curse: the number of parameters needed to describe a state scales exponentially with the system size. The idea of tensor network states is to parametrize quantum states ‘locally’ in a way that matches ground states of local Hamiltonians. This idea has been very successful, both in numerical methods as well as a theoretical tool to understand phases of matter. In this talk I will present some of the fascinating mathematical questions that arise in the study of tensor networks.
Sophie Huiberts (Columbia University)
Theoretical analysis of (integer) linear programming
Integer programming provides a powerful abstraction, capable of expressing many practical problems. Even though the integer programming problem is NP-Hard, modern software can solve practical instances extremely well. In this talk, I will highlight a number of aspects where theoretical progress has been made towards understanding the performance of state-of-the-art techniques.
