Promoting women: Institute for Numerical Simulation honors outstanding thesis with the Ada Lovelace Prize

From left to right: - Jürgen Dölz, Joscha Gedicke, Carsten Burstedde, the Award
From left to right: - Jürgen Dölz, Joscha Gedicke, Carsten Burstedde, the Award recipient Vera Weber, Michael Griebel, Ira Neitzel (next to the Award recipient), Barbara Verfürth and Martin Rumpf. © Photo: Institute of Numerical Simulation all images in original size .
Recognizing Female Academics: The Institute of Numerical Simulation has presented the Ada Lovelace Award to the writer of an outstanding thesis paper

Vera Weber of the University of Bonn Institute of Numerical Simulation has become the recipient of the Ada Lovelace Award, presented to female mathematicians working in the field of Numerics, for her excellent master’s thesis. The Award comes with a purse of 1,000 euros. This is the second time the mathematician has earned the Award, having already been recognized for her bachelor’s thesis of distinction in 2019. 

The Ada Lovelace Award for female mathematicians has been bestowed annually since its introduction in 2010 by the University of Bonn Institute of Numerical Simulation. Created to benefit promising female graduate students in the field of Numerics, the Award is named after British mathematician Ada Lovelace (1815-1852). The Award is given for bachelor’s and master’s theses and dissertations submitted by female undergraduate or graduate students which are exemplary of outstanding scholarship. The prize for a winning bachelor’s thesis is 500 euros, 1,000 euros for a master’s thesis and 2,000 euros for a doctoral dissertation.

The winner for the 2022/2023 academic year was Vera Weber for her master’s thesis titled "On aspects of discretization strategies with applications in imaging", with Professor Ira Neitzel as supervisor. In her thesis Weber examined aspects of discretization in the total variation regularization of optimization problems in mathematical image processing. Her paper evidences uncommon thematic breadth, the judges panel noted, the theoretical part being concerned with aspects of relevance in different areas of mathematics (functional analysis, optimization, numerical mathematics). She provided compelling explanations of the challenging mathematical concepts which are applied for image processing, the panel found, and that the paper furthermore is written with clarity and is quite thorough, being replete with specific literature references. Having previously been recognized in 2019 as writer of the most distinguished bachelor’s thesis in the field of Numerics, Vera Weber now accepts the Award for female graduate students for the second time.

For further information on the Ada Lovelace Award visit: https://ins.uni-bonn.de/co­ntent/stud­ent-prizes