Congratulations to Balázs Mezei, who passed his PhD viva at the end of May! He was the first student of the Mathematics department to have an online viva.
Balázs Mezei with his PhD supervisor Prof Stefanie Gerke
Balázs Mezei's online viva was very amicable; it was followed by an online celebration when staff and PhD students from Mathematics and the Information Security Group got together on MS Teams to celebrate Balázs’s achievement.
Balázs’s PhD thesis is on Algorithmic, probabilistic, and physics-inspired methods for cuts and shortest paths in graphs and was supervised by Professor Stefanie Gerke and Professor Gregory Sorkin (LSE). As the title suggests, it considers two fundamental combinatorial optimisation problems — cuts and shortest paths — and uses methods from a wide-ranging spectrum to find for example the value of the “kth-shortest” path in a complete graph with random edge weights, or bounds on the size of a minimum cut in any regular graph.
Balázs has now started a postdoc position at Oxford. We wish him all the best and hope to see him back at Royal Holloway soon! Congratulations, Dr Balázs Mezei and Prof Gerke!
