ISyE Professor Antonius "Ton* Bernardus Dieker was awarded the prestigious Gijs de Leve Prize for the best Dutch PhD dissertation for the years of 2006, 2007, and 2008 in the field of mathematics of operations research during the 34th Conference on the Mathematics of Operations Research in Lunteren, The Netherlands on January 14, 2009. The jury for the prize was "deeply impressed with Dieker's achievements.*

Dieker's thesis, "Extremes and fluid queues,* focuses on fluid queues through a connection with record values ('extremes') of random processes.

"Queueing theory is a set of mathematical techniques positioned to understand fluctuations in business and service systems, aimed at controlling disturbance and improving efficiency,* said Dieker. "In some applications of queueing theory, such as modern communication networks, the items being queued up are so small that they can hardly be distinguished. The resulting queueing models are called fluid queues.*

Dieker's other research interests include queueing models, fluid and diffusion approximations, Gaussian processes and fractional Brownian motion, heavy tails, large deviations, L*vy processes, rare event simulation, and enumerative combinatorics. His academic career is populated with many notable achievements and accolades as well as a myriad of published articles from his research. The most recent awards are the Stieltjes prize for best Dutch math PhD thesis of 2006, IBM Goldstine Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship (August 2007), and Applied Probability Trust Award (March 2006).

In addition to Dieker's ongoing research and assistant professorship at the Stewart School of ISyE, he also conducted postdoctoral research with IBM Research and the University College Cork, Ireland. His educational background includes a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Amsterdam and a Masters of Science in Operations Research at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Receiving this prize was "a great honor* for Dieker as he refers to Gijs de Leve, a famed mathematician from the University of Amsterdam who had made many contributions to OR in The Netherlands, as "his scientific great-grandfather.*

Landelijk Netwerk Mathematische Besliskunde (LNMB), the Board of the Dutch Network on the Mathematics of Operations Research, oversees the Gijs de Leve Prize.
Previous recipients of this prestigious award are:
Sem Borst (1994-1996)
Jos Sturm (1997-1999)
Bert Zwart (2000-2002)
Rene Sitters (2003-2005)