Volker Strassen

Volker Strassen, born on 29 April 1936 in Düsseldorf-Gerresheim, is a German mathematician who is professor emeritus at the University of Konstanz. He studied music, philosophy, physics and mathematics at several German universities and took his doctorate in mathematics at Göttingen in 1962 under Konrad Jacobs. After a spell at the University of California, Berkeley, he directed the Seminar for Applied Mathematics at Zurich from 1968 and moved to Konstanz in 1988, retiring in 1998. He began as a probability theorist, with an invariance principle for the law of the iterated logarithm, and then turned to algorithms and complexity. His 1969 paper Gaussian Elimination is Not Optimal introduced the matrix multiplication method now called Strassen's algorithm, which beats the naive cubic running time. With Arnold Schönhage he devised a fast integer multiplication algorithm, and with Robert Solovay the Solovay-Strassen primality test, the first to show that primality can be tested in randomized polynomial time. His honours include the Cantor medal, the Paris Kanellakis Award and the Knuth Prize.