Youngest PhD student to receive doctorate
On Thursday, 13 December 2012, Floor Sietsma defended her PhD thesis at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). At age 20, she is the youngest person in the Netherlands to ever receive the doctorate.
Sietsma completed her doctoral thesis, under the supervision of Professors Jan van Eijck and Krzysztof Apt (CWI/UvA), in about two and a half years. She worked on her PhDthesis entitled "Logics of Communication and Knowledge"’ at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), where Sietsma is still employed.
About the research
Floor Sietsma investigated the transfer of knowledge through communication using epistemic logic, the logic of knowledge. Her research concerns many forms of communication, each with different assumptions about, for example, the visibility of messages to non-recipients and the knowledge of the participants about the structure of the communication network.
An important part of the thesis is about complex email conversations with many visible (CC) and hidden (BCC) recipients. Sietsma investigated what forms of knowledge can be achieved using these special recipient lists and what impact the use of BCC recipients has on the knowledge of regular recipients. Sietsma: ‘Imagine a situation in which a secret is revealed via email, and one has to find out who knows about this information, and where it came from.’
About Floor Sietsma
Sietsma started her PhD research in early 2010 at age 17. She already held a Bachelor's degree in computer science and a Master's degree in logic from the UvA, and, at the age of 12, was the youngest student ever at a Dutch university.
For her PhD research, she was awarded a special, personal grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) because of her unique talents. In addition, she was recently elected 'Nerd of the Year' by readers of the magazine Quest. For the next year and half, Sietsma will remain attached to CWI as researcher. She has also started a Bachelor’s in pedagogy to be able to help gifted children as educationist.