Courses

CWI highly values education. CWI researchers not only supervise and inspire the CWI PhD students, but also aim at contributing to teaching Master's students at universities. See the overview of CWI's current involvement in teaching courses in the Netherlands below.

Contribution to education

CWI is a research institute and does not have education as an institutional task. However, many of the senior researchers of CWI contribute to education via an affiliation or part-time appointment at one of the Dutch universities. CWI conveys the knowledge of the scientists employed at our institute to the new generation of mathematics and computer science students. Our staff contributes by e.g. teaching a university course or supervising MSc thesis projects carried out by university students. They also supervise PhD students at CWI, who defend their thesis at one of the Dutch universities after their employment at CWI. All courses can be found below in alphabetical order. You can also open the pdf for a complete overview.

Modern Cryptography

URL
Focus

This Master's level course provides an introduction to modern cryptography, the science of securing communication and computation against different forms of adversarial behaviors.

Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Period
7 sep 2026 – 1 dec 2027
Level
MSc
ECTS
8.00

Performance of Networked Systems

In this course, we will address performance-related challenges and solution methods in communication networks. To this end, we focus on performance modeling, traffic management, QoS provisioning and capacity planning for both wired and wireless/mobile communication networks.

URL
Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Period
28 oct 2026 – 18 dec 2026
Level
MSc
ECTS
6.00

Stochastic decision theory

URL
Focus

The goal of the course is to familiarize students with the basic mathematical concepts and computational techniques for stochastic decision and optimization problems, and illustrate the application of these methods in various scenarios.

Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Other educators
  • dr. J. Sanders, MSc (Instructor)
Period
15 nov 2026 – 21 mar 2027
Level
MSc
ECTS
5.00

Networks and Semidefinite Programming

URL
Focus

The course deals with several basic combinatorial optimization problems. While these problems are intrinsically hard to solve in general, we will present polynomial-time solvable instances. Algorithms use combinatorial tools, linear and semidefinite programming.

Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Other educators
  • Polak, Sven (Lecturer)
Period
23 nov 2026 – 22 feb 2027
Location
Utrecht Universiteit
Level
PhD

Algorithmic Methods in Queueing Theory

This course focuses on the algorithmic aspects of stochastic operations research, with a particular emphasis on Markov processes and queueing theory. It explores both exact and approximate solutions for performance measures, such as the mean and distribution of customer numbers and sojourn times in various systems.

Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Other educators
  • Dr. S. Kapodistria (Lecturer)
Period
23 nov 2026 – 22 feb 2027
Location
Utrecht University
Other urls
Level
PhD
ECTS
4.00

Advanced Quantum Algorithms

A major claim to fame of quantum computers is that they will be able to solve some problems significantly faster than believed to be possible on a classical computer. The design of further quantum algorithms is an exciting active field of research, and there is still much left to explore in understanding which problems can be sped up by quantum computers, and by how much.

URL
Focus

In this course, students will learn about various advanced topics in quantum algorithms and algorithm design, as well as techniques for understanding for which problems it is possible to get a quantum speedup, and by how much.

Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Period
1 feb 2027 – 25 mar 2027
Level
MSc
ECTS
6.00

Advanced Representation Theory and Applications

In this course we build the theory of Schur-Weyl duality, highest-weight vectors, Clebsch-Gordan and Kronecker coefficients, moment polytopes, and symmetric polynomials, and then study various areas of applications including quantum information theory and quantum algorithms, optimization, and algebraic complexity theory.

Type
Master project
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Period
1 feb 2027 – 28 may 2027
Other urls
Level
MSc
ECTS
6.00

Additive Combinatorics and Applications

Additive combinatorics is a relatively new area of mathematics that brings together topics such as combinatorial and analytic number theory, Ramsey theory, harmonic analysis, graph theory, extremal combinatorics, algebraic methods, ergodic theory and probability theory. The area has strong connections with theoretical computer science, including quantum computing. A centerpiece result is the Green-Tao theorem, which asserts that the prime numbers contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. A general theme that drives much of the area has to do with relating quantitative notions of approximate algebraic structure.

URL
Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Period
1 feb 2027 – 4 jul 2027
Location
Leiden
Level
MSc
ECTS
6.00