Laudatio
In his master's thesis «The essential numerical range of type 5», which was awarded the highest degree 6.0, Nicolas Hefti achieved a truly remarkable result with highly unexpected methods. He solved a hard open problem for unbounded linear operators in infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces. Unexpectedly, his proof uses an abstract result for Banach spaces which have less structure than Hilbert spaces.
Moreover, he succeeded to generalize a geometric property of essential numerical ranges, making nume-rous earlier results special cases of his result. In view of applications, the abstract results of his thesis have implications to capture and detect the unwanted phenomenon of spectral pollution where numerical approximations of eigenvalues converge to limits that are no true eigenvalues (spurious eigenvalues).
The outstanding master's thesis of N. Hefti has already become the basis of a scientific paper that will soon be submitted (and will already be his second publication).