Networks

Pieter Kleer wins Gijs de Leve Prize

Pieter Kleer, former NETWORKS PhD student, has been awarded the Gijs de Leve Prize 2018-2020. He received the prize on 22 January 2021 on the occasion of the annual congress of the LNMB, the Dutch Network on the Mathematics of Operations Research. In awarding Pieter Kleer this prestigious prize, the jury recognized his PhD thesis as the 'best PhD thesis in the area of Mathematics of Operations Research defended in the last three years'.

 

PieterKlee2rPieter received the prize for his thesis ‘When Nash met Markov: Novel results for pure Nash equilibria and the switch Markov chain’, which was the result of his research under the guidance of Guido Schäfer and Lex Schrijver. Pieter defended his PhD thesis at VU Amsterdam in 2019 and graduated with honours ('cum laude').

 

The jury said: “Pieter Kleer has written two PhD-theses in one, both of exceptionally high quality and based on six papers all appearing in top venues”. This research has several application areas, like traffic. When drivers avoid certain highways to escape the risk of usual traffic jams, they can significantly increase the average travel time for everyone in the road network. In his thesis, Pieter Kleer developed unifying models to analyze the longer average travel times due to this behaviour.

 

About the Gijs de Leve Prize

The Gijs de Leve Prize consists of ‘everlasting fame’ and 1000 euros. The prize is named after mathematician Gijs de Leve (1926-2009), who is considered the founder of operations research in the Netherlands.