Sarah Jane Selkirk receives Award of Excellence

University mathematics is creative. Sarah Jane Selkirk, who came to Klagenfurt from South Africa as a doctoral student in 2020 and completed her doctorate as part of the doc.funds doctoral school “Modeling – Analysis – Optimisation of discrete, continuous, and stochastic systems”, is particularly keen to solve puzzles in an imaginative way. On 7 December 2023, she was presented with the Award of Excellence.

Sarah Jane Selkirk specialises in the mathematical field of combinatorics. Her work centres on the mathematical structure of trees, familiar to us as the structure of folders and files on a computer, to give an example. Typical applications of this structure include algorithms and statistics. “I’m interested in discovering how many different combinations and possibilities there are within such a system and how I can calculate them,” she explains.

In an award ceremony on 7 December 2023, Federal Minister Martin Polaschek presented her with the Award of Excellence (state prize for the best dissertations) for her thesis entitled “Statistics in lattice paths and tree-like structures”.

Every year, the Award of Excellence is presented to the 40 best theses of the previous academic year. The prize, which is endowed with 3,000 euros, is funded by the funding programme for academic studies; nominations are submitted by the universities. The Award of Excellence is presented by the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research.

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