BMS alumnus Dr. Raman Sanyal was awarded the Berlin Tiburtius Prize 2009 for his outstanding dissertation. In his dissertation titled "Constructions and Obstructions for Extremal Polytopes", Raman Sanyal looked at the properties and constructions of polytopes. Generally, very little is known about the properties of higher-dimensional polytopes with dim > 3. There are construction mechanisms which take well-understood, high-dimensional polytopes (dim > 20) and transform them into lower-dimensional polytopes without loosing certain properties, e.g. number of vertices. This is one way of constructing 4-dimensional polytopes with interesting properties. However, these mechanisms don't always work. Raman Sanyal tried to understand when and why they fail and developed effective methods to describe the situations in which they fail. With that understanding of their geometry a lot of applications, e.g. in linear optimization, can be improved.

Raman Sanyal finished his "Diplom" in Computer Science in 2005 and was one of the first BMS Phase II students. He wrote his dissertation with Prof. Günter M. Ziegler in the RTG "Methods of Discrete Structures" from 2005-2008. Since January 2009 he is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Tiburtius Prize was named after the former Berlin Senator for Science and Education Joachim Tiburtius, who served from 1951 until 1963. The prize is awarded annually for outstanding theses and dissertations by the presidents of the Berlin universities. In 2009, three theses and three dissertations were honored and three dissertations received an honorary mention.