Former CWI PhD student Lucas Slot has been awarded the Stieltjes Prize for the best mathematical PhD thesis in the Netherlands in the academic year 2022-2023. Slot did his PhD research in the Networks & Optimization group at CWI and defended his thesis at Tilburg University ‘cum laude’ in 2022. The jury for the Stieltjes Prize assessed in total 76 dissertations. On 3 April 2024, Slot received the prize at the Dutch Mathematical Congress (NMC 2024), where he gave a presentation about his research.
The jury said, among others, that Slot’s research "gives a strong improvement on the best known results in literature", and that his PhD thesis is based on 7 papers, "most of them already published in high ranked journals". The jury also noted that the thesis was written in only 3,5 years, concluding: "We see this as an excellent thesis which fully deserves the Stieltjesprijs".
