Djordjo Milovic wins Stieltjes prize
On 4 April 2018 the Stieltjes prize 2016 was awarded to Djordjo Milovic for his PhD thesis 'On the 16-rank of class groups of quadratic number fields'.
The Stieltjes prize is awarded yearly by the Royal Dutch Mathematical Society for the best PhD thesis in mathematics in the Netherlands. A jury selected the thesis by Djordjo Milovic from the set of all 79 theses written in 2016, ex aequo with the thesis of Richard Kraaij. Djordjo Milovic obtained his PhD with Peter Stevenhagen for groundbreaking work in number theory.
Djordjo Milovic received his bachelor degree cum laude from Princeton University in 2011, and subsequently joined the European ALGANT-programme in Algebra, Geometry and Number Theory, in which Leiden is an important participant, for his master studies. After studies at Università degli Studi di Milano (2011–12) and Université Paris-Sud (2012–13), he was appointed on an Erasmus Mundus grant in the PhD-programme of ALGANT, now dividing his time between Leiden and Paris.
Milovic's thesis is concerned with the average structure of algebraic groups of which the definition goes back to the famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, in the beginning of the 19th century. The questions that Milovic attacks are classical, but at the same time central to modern number theory. Noteworthy is Milovic's mathematical inventiveness in combining algebraic and analytical points of view. He thus managed to make serious progress in an area that was almost abandoned, because the questions seemed too hard to settle, notwithstanding conjectures to solutions. His work will have impact also on the solution of other open problems in number theory.