Department of Mathematics

Maths MSc Prize Winners 2005

Gabriel Rosenberg - Haya Freedman Prize
Iain Morrow - Lionel Cooper Prize

Congratulations from the Department of Mathematics go to Gabriel Rosenberg, the first winner of the Haya Freedman Prize for Best Dissertation on the MSc in Applicable Mathematics. More details about the prize can be viewed here.

Gabe's dissertation topic, supervised by Bernhard von Stengel, was 'Enumeration of All Extreme Equilibria of Bimatrix Games with Integer Pivoting and Improved Degeneracy Check', which has since been published in the CDAM Research Report Series as paper LSE-CDAM-2005-18 and can be found online here. Gabe scored a remarkable 89% for this piece of work, the top dissertation mark. Gabe told us that, "I found Bernhard's enthusiasm for the topic and for working with students comforting and inspiring. That type of dedication to students is rare, and I think it's fitting that the award named after Dr Freedman, a teacher who was known for such qualities, is going to a student of Bernhard's."

Gabe has also asked us to reproduce here the acknowledgements from his dissertation:

"An enormous thank you is due to my advisor, Dr. Bernhard von Stengel of the Department of Mathematics at the London School of Economics, for his incredible help with this paper. The paper is a direct result of the immeasurable time he spent helping me understand the subject matter and providing insight into the problem and its solutions. My introduction under his watch to the world of mathematical research made this project the highlight of my academic year. Thank you also to Rahul Savani of LSE for his help in answering my questions relating to the subject matter.

I had the fortunate opportunity to meet and discuss this work with several of the authors of related papers. Thank you to David Avis of McGill University and Charles Audet and Pierre Hansen of the Groupe d'´etudes et de Recherche en Analyse des D´ecisions. These group discussions contributed greatly to portions of the paper, including clarifying various choices for the objective function and understanding the problem of degeneracy.

Lastly, I would like to thank the entire Department of Mathematics at LSE for a fantastic inaugural year of the MSc program in Applicable Mathematics."

LIONEL COOPER PRIZE

Congratulations from the Department of Mathematics go to Iain Morrow, winner of the prestigious 2005 University of London-wide Lionel Cooper Prize for Mathematics. The Lionel Cooper Prize is awarded for excellence in all assessed parts of an MSc course at a College of London University, of which Mathematics forms at least 50%, in other words for best performance on a University of London Mathematics Masters programme.

Iain achieved this with an outstanding degree average of nearly 88%, including marks of 97% for MA401 and 90% for MA410. He was the only student to achieve more than 80% in every module of the degree. This includes a mark of 82% for his dissertation, 'When to say “Don’t Know”: Confidence in Automatically Generated Hypotheses without the Assumption of an Underlying Distribution', which has since been published in the CDAM Research Report Series as paper LSE-CDAM-2005-17. This can be found online here.

The Department would like to congratulate Gabe, Iain and all of our finalists on their achievements and to wish them well in their future studies/careers.

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