Today, the prestigious ‘Van Dantzigprijs’, the highest Dutch award in statistics and operational research, has been handed out. This year the jury has chosen unanimously to honour two winners instead of one. Peter Grünwald of the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam and part-time professor at the Mathematical Institute of the Leiden University and Harry van Zanten, professor at the Technical University of Eindhoven (TU/e) and researcher at Eurandom, received the award this afternoon at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. The Van Dantzigprijs was handed out at the yearly congress of the Association of Statistics and Operational Research (VVS-OR).

The award is given every five year to a young researcher who has contributed significantly to developments in statistics and/or operational research. Both researchers have a different background. Grünwald is specialized in computer science (or machine learning) and Van Zanten graduated in pure probability. Both researchers changed their attitude from their own field of science to statistics. Their new insights add to the synthesis between the Bayesian and frequentic statistics. They also added to the renewal of this field of science from ‘machine learning’, also known as self learning software.

Please see the Dutch version of this page for more information.

More information at: www.vvs-or.nl.