We are proud to share that Martijn Gösgens won the Willem R. van Zwet Award. This award is bestowed annually by the Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research (VVSOR) on an excellent Ph.D. in statistics or operations research, obtained at a Dutch university. Martijn obtained his Ph.D. in community detection in random graphs. On Thursday, March 20, he presented his dissertation titled "Detecting small and large communities in networks” at the annual meeting of VVSOR, in light of his victory.
For The Network Pages, Martijn wrote various insightful and entertaining articles! He also supported other authors, developing interactive visualizations that help explain network theory in a way that can be understood by non-mathematicians. For instance, he made the visualizations in this blog.
In short, Martijn has proven to be a valuable contributor to the mathematics community. He is passionate about inspiring others, even appearing as one of the Faces of Science for the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. We had the pleasure of interviewing Martijn!
Congratulations! How was it?
It was very nice! The annual meeting was held in a beautiful, old church in Utrecht. There were several presentations from prominent Dutch statisticians and operations researchers. There was even a presentation by the founder of ORTEC, a large multinational company, founded by Dutch students, that leverages the power of mathematics for companies and for society.
Next to the Van Zwet award, there were other awards; like the Jan Hemelrijk award for Best Master Thesis and the Van Dantzig Award, the highest award given out by the VVSOR.
Martijn Gösgens, Postdoctoral researcher at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands.
I was very honored to receive the Van Zwet award for best Ph.D. thesis. I had fifteen minutes to give an overview of my research, which is very little given that I worked on it for four years! My presentation was based on a brief 10-minute presentation I already had, but I added some details to make it satisfying for the mathematical audience!
What stood out about your work, according to the jury?
They liked that my research was somewhat outside-of-the-box: it connects many different aspects of the topic and displayed creativity. In an email, they wrote that they were impressed by "the impact of the work, the innovative character and the pleasant writing style."
My research is about community detection in networks, which is basically taking a graph (with nodes and edges) and clustering the nodes within it. There are a lot of existing algorithms. I designeda geometric framework in which many existing algorithms fit. Using it, these algorithms become easier to compare. We could also include some Bayesian statistics. In short, there was a bit of everything.
Why research community detection?
To start, there is no consensus about what the actual problem is, even though the idea of community detection is very intuitive. You can roughly imagine what should happen, but different people attempt it with different motivations. There's people in sociology, biology, physics, computer science, all interested in their versions of communities. And that's why you get many different algorithms. Some are based on physical particle systems, some are inspired by random walks, there are also very statistical methods, you name it.
The objective is typically: obtain a summary of the graph. Big graphs are a big spaghetti monster of nodes and edges. It is useful to input the data and get a summary of the relevant groups of nodes and their connections, which is easier to interpret.
So part of what I did is formulate a precise mathematical objective that represents this idea. This was already a challenge and took some time! Then I designed a way to really compare existing methods, methods that come from various branches of science.
What are you most proud of?
About two years ago, during a summer school here with mathematicians from all over Europe, I shared strange open problems that I encountered in my research with fellow mathematicians. Eventually, they solved these problems. Together, we wrote a paper that I am very proud of. That's what science is all about! You can choose to do things by yourself, but it is less fun and is not as effective as collaborating, I think. You learn a lot from each other.
What's next?
After almost ten years at TU Eindhoven, I'm now a postdoctoral researcher in Amsterdam, atthe national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands (CWI). I work on robust optimization. We are interested in applying this knowledge to improve energy grids during the energy transition. At the same time, I'm continuing to work on problems from the Ph.D., and problems that remain from a short Postdoctoral position in Canada.
Research never ends, does it?
No, it doesn't!
For now, Martijn is busy packing boxes, as he's moving from Eindhoven to Utrecht. After that, more research will surely escape his desk and find its way into the mathematical community.
Two weeks ago I had the pleasure to attend two events where prizes for outstanding research in mathematics were awarded, the Christiaan Huygens Science prize and the CWI Best Thesis in Applied Math 2024.
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'.
An echo chamber is a community wherein the same opinions are bounced around, endlessly ‘echoing’ with barely any change. And as they do, any other opinion is shunned, pushed aside, and eventually just rejected without consideration.
