Helene Rytgaard receives prize for Best Master Thesis 2016

"It is with great pleasure that I hereby, on behalf of the Danish Mathematical Society, announce that Helene Rytgaards thesis is the winner of the DMF Thesis Prize 2016," writes DMF chairman Steen Thorbjørnsen.

The thesis that made Helene MSc. - Statistical Models for Robust Spline Smoothing - is of Danish Mathematical Society rated as the best mathematics thesis submitted in 2016. Lars Lau Raket has been supervisor and Bo Markussen co-supervisor.

A unanimous assessment committee, headed by Professor Vagn Lundsgaard Hansen, has nominated the thesis with the following description and motivation:

"In her thesis Helene Rytgaard presents a new mathematical framework for statistical models for curve data in which one or more model parameters are elements of function spaces. The literature on such functional data is dominated by heuristic methods, and the few sources that are both mathematically rigorous and describes the problems consistent in mathematical statistical sense, are inaccessible.

Within a classical mathematical statistical framework Rytgaard in an elegant and natural way utilizes the latest functional analytical methods in the theory of differential equations in Hilbert spaces and Sobolev spaces, including the theory of reproducing kernel. The obtained theoretical results she translates into efficient algorithms that are implemented and used in concrete data analyses.

The thesis includes several original contributions, such as a description of the spline problem in a statistical framework that explicitly allows modeling of boundary conditions and provides much greater flexibility in the modeling of data than the classical approach."

Helene, who today is a PhD student at the Department of Public Health, Section of Biostatistics, will be awarded with the prize (15,000 kr.) at an event on 2 June.

From 15:00 to 16:00 Helene and her thesis supervisor, Lars Lau Raket, will hold lectures on the thesis and its subject matter in Auditorium 6, HC Ørsted Instituttet, Universitetsparken 5, 2100 Copenhagen. 

After the lectures DMF will host an reception in front of Auditorium 1. This part of the event is expected to start around 16:15 and end around 17:30.

Edlund A/S is sponsor for the DMF Thesis Prize.

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