The KWG PhD Prize

Last October the Royal Dutch Mathematical Society (KWG) hosted the PhD Prize competition. Normally this event would have taken place during the Dutch Mathematical Congress (NMC) in April but due to the corona outbreak this meeting was cancelled and the competition postponed. As the prospects of organizing a real live event in the autumn slimmed, the organizers decided to hold a virtual zoom-meeting instead. On 6 October five candidates for the prize, selected from a longlist of fifteen, were each given the opportunity to present their work in a twenty minute online public talk followed by a five minute question and answer session. Based on their performances a jury of four mathematicians (Kees Oosterlee, Maria Vlasiou, Ronald de Wolf and Raf Bocklandt) awarded the prize to Emiel Lorist for his clear presentation, fitting use of multimedia and good handling of the questions. The jury was impressed by the quality of all five presentations and to give you an idea of the broad range of interesting topics that were covered, we asked the candidates to provide us with a nice picture drawn from their slides accompanied with a little explanation.