Defense of Diane Puges
On June 17, 2025, Diane Puges completed her doctoral studies with her defense. In her presentation, “From Linear Orderings to Infinite Trees: Semidefinite Programming for Combinatorial Optimization and Extremal Combinatorics,” she presented her work applying semidefinite methods in a wide range of polynomial optimization applications.
This includes problems related to minimum cut-width, box-constrained quadratic problems, and problems in extremal combinatorics, where she investigated so-called leaf-labeled rooted binary trees and Ramsey numbers. The examiners, Annie Raymond from the University of Massachusetts and Monique Laurent from CWI Amsterdam, were impressed by her work.
Diane Puges obtained an engineering degree from Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and a master’s degree from Conservatoire national des Arts et Métiers, both in Paris. During her studies, she held research stays at INRIA in Santiago (Chile) and at TU Dortmund (Germany). Since2021 she was a PhD student within the doc.funds doctoral school Modeling – Analysis – Optimization of discrete, continuous, and stochastic systems at the University of Klagenfurt.
