A former student of the Scuola Normale, Simunec receives the award set up by the University of Campania in recognition of his thesis on numerical analysis.
PISA, December 1, 2025. The “Daniela di Serafino” International Ph.D. Prize 2025, set up by the University of Campania, was awarded to Igor Simunec for his Ph.D. thesis on Computational Methods and Mathematical Models for the Sciences and Finance, titled “Advances in polynomial and rational Krylov methods for matrix functions with applications”, written under the supervision of professor Michele Benzi.
In addition to studying for his Ph.D. course at the Normale, completed in 2024, Simunec, from Cittadella in the province of Padua, was also an undergraduate student in Mathematics (2015-2020). Since November 2024 he has been a postdoc at the Institute of Mathematics of the École Federale Polytechnique of Lausanne.
The prize, in its first edition, is dedicated to the memory of Daniela di Serafino, full professor of Numerical Analysis at the Department of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Campania “L. Vanvitelli” (Caserta) and subsequently at the Department of Mathematics and Applications at the University of Naples “Federico II”, who died prematurely in August 2022. The initiative has the aim of recognising Ph.D. theses of exceptional merit in the field of numerical analysis, with particular regard to optimisation and to numerical linear algebra, sectors to which Daniela di Serafino brought important contributions. The prize consists of 2,500 euros and an invitation to hold a seminar at the University of Campania.
