Monique Laurent was recently elected as EUROPT Fellow 2021!
EUROPT is the EURO Working Group on Continuous Optimization. By annually awarding this Fellowship, EUROPT honours outstanding researchers in continuous optimization. The Fellowship is presented at the EUROPT Workshop, where the Fellow presents the EUROPT Fellow Lecture as a plenary talk. This year's workshop was held on 7-9 July at ENAC - Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile in Toulouse (France).
Monique Laurent, researcher and management team member at CWI (Center for Mathematics and Computer Science) and a professor at Tilburg University, is widely acknowledged for her research. In 2018 she was elected as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and in 2019 as a member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW). She is much in demand as a speaker at international conferences. In 2014 she spoke at the International Congress of Mathematicians - the most important conference for mathematicians in the world - and in 2018 she held a plenary lecture at ISMP, the triennial international symposium of the Mathematical Optimization Society, for over a thousand participants from science and industry. She also opened the World Women in Mathematics event (WM)² in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, uniting female mathematicians from all over the world. [1]
Research
Her field of research is discrete mathematics and optimization. She is in particular interested in the design of efficient algorithms for hard combinatorial problems and, more generally, polynomial optimization problems, where objective and constraints are multivariate polynomial functions. Her focus lies in understanding and exploiting combinatorial and algebraic structure in order to develop methods from algebra, geometry and optimization leading to efficient algorithms. [2]
A couple of years ago Monique Laurent gave a lecture in a symposium organised by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the research program NETWORKS on Ordering data with network methods. During this lecture she showed how simple network search methods can be used in data analysis to order given objects by their similarities. This is relevant, for instance, for genome sequencing and for relative chronological ranking of archaeological sites. You can watch the lecture here.
During the last decades, many resources have been invested in quantum computing. This research field has grown immensely and amazing results have been obtained. The plans for the future are highly ambitious, but at the same time, there are serious questions that need to be addressed.
Two weeks ago I had the pleasure to attend two events where prizes for outstanding research in mathematics were awarded, one of them was the CWI Best Thesis in Applied Math 2024. It was a great pleasure to be there, to chat with (most of) the candidates, and to learn what they have done during their bachelor and master thesis'.
In this article, we will discuss a mathematical riddle that "seems impossible even if you know the answer". It is better known as the 100 prisoners problem.
In this article Maya continues her journey from Rotterdam to Brussels. She starts thinking about a puzzle from her childhood, the three utilities problem. At the end of the jouney she has reached a very important theorem from graph theory!
