Fred J. Hickernell, chair and professor of applied mathematics at Illinois Tech, was invited to give a tutorial on Error Analysis for Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods on August 14, 2016, at the 12th International Conference on Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods in Scientific Computing, held at Stanford University. Monte Carlo methods use random numbers to solve a wide variety of problems in science, engineering, and finance. Hickernell has served on the steering committee of this conference series since 2006.

During the conference, Hickernell was awarded the 2016 Joseph F. Traub Prize for Achievement in Information-Based Complexity. This field of computational mathematics and theoretical computer science endeavors to determine the lowest possible computational cost of algorithms for solving numerical problems to a given accuracy, and also tries to construct practical algorithms with minimal computational cost.