Successful dissertation on systems of polynomial equations

Congratulations to Kemal Samuel Rose on the successful defense of his thesis on “Sparse polynomial system(s) in optimization” as well as on his new position at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Well done!

Systems of polynomial equations appear both in mathematics, as well as in many applications in the sciences, economics and engineering. In his thesis Kemal studied the structure of these equations and the geometry of their solution sets. “One of the most important, and also most common, features of these equations is sparsity. We explore the effects of sparsity in global optimization, when exhibited by constraints and objective functions. Exploiting this property can lead to drastic improvements of computational performance of algorithms. The interaction between algebraic geometry and numerical computation is a central theme throughout my thesis. Commonly, the use of numerical computation in pure mathematics is restricted by the lack of a certificate for correctness. We address this by implementing a numerical certification technique," he describes his scientific focus.

Kemal Samuel Rose received his Bachelor's degree and Master of Science in Mathematics on the topic “The non-Gorenstein locus of toric varieties” from the Technische Universität Berlin. He was a PhD student in the Nonlinear Algebra group under the supervision of Bernd Sturmfels and Simon Telen. Already in January 2024, Kemal moved to the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is working as a postdoctoral researcher in the research field “Algebra, combinatorics and topology”, led by Sandra di Rocco.