VUB professor recognised for international impact in maths

Prof Jan De Beule from the Department of Mathematics and Data Science at VUB has received the 2022 Hall Medal from the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications (ICA) for his extensive high-quality research. His peers have given him this award in recognition of his substantial international impact in the field of finite geometry and applications in coding theory. Prof Jan De Beule obtained a PhD in mathematics from Ghent University in 2004 and worked first as a postdoctoral researcher for the Research Foundation - Flanders in Ghent and later at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He has been a lecturer at VUB since 2020. His research area includes finite geometries and their substructures and applications in coding theory and cryptography. This involves developing methods to send and encrypt data without error. "If you entrust large amounts of data to your favourite cloud, that encryption ensures you won't lose data due to a computer failure," he explains.