“Onno is a very dedicated mathematician and extremely loyal towards his colleagues and to math in general,” the nomination continues. “He is very committed to young people, be it the young permanent staff of the Section Stochastics, bachelor’s students who experience difficulties during their final projects, or our section’s secretary. Onno is always ready to help people and is the first to approach matters from a personal perspective. In a time when efficiency seems to be the magic word, perhaps too much so, this very human approach is extremely important if we wish to continue to bring people together and to let them fully develop their talents.”

“The Eurandom institute has an excellent reputation, especially in the field of probability theory and stochastic operations research, and this is largely due to Onno Boxma’s efforts,” says Remco van der Hofstad, head of the Section Stochastics and Boxma’s successor as scientific director of Eurandom. “Onno was able to convince many scientific top talents to come to Eindhoven. He did this in a way that made others shine, because Onno is very modest and doesn’t like to take center stage too much.”

During the last thirty years, Onno Boxma sat on advisory committees for several institutions, including the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW), the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and several Dutch universities. His colleagues acknowledge that in doing so, Boxma has greatly advanced math in the Netherlands.