Volker Strassen

Volker Strassen (2009)

Volker Strassen (born April 29, 1936 in Düsseldorf-Gerresheim ) is a German mathematician .

Career

Volker Strassen (1979)

Strassen initially studied music and philosophy at the University of Cologne , from 1955 mathematics, philosophy and physics at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and from 1957 only physics and mathematics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and from 1958 at the Georg-August -University of Göttingen . He received his doctorate in 1962 with a thesis on information theory and Gustave Choquet's theory of capacities under Konrad Jacobs in Göttingen. In 1966 he completed his habilitation in Erlangen. From 1962 to 1964 and 1966 to 1968 (as Associate Professor) he was at the University of California, Berkeley . During this time he published works on probability theory, among other things .

In 1968 he was appointed to the University of Zurich to become head of the Institute for Applied Mathematics . As part of this activity, he became one of the pioneers of the then still young mathematical discipline of complexity theory .

His work Gaussian Elimination is not optimal , published in 1969, is today considered pioneering work in the field of algorithms , although the Strassen algorithm published in this work can currently only be implemented for relatively small or very large matrices with an advantage over the standard algorithm for matrix multiplication .

In 1972, together with Arnold Schönhage, he developed the Schönhage-Strassen algorithm , which is still the fastest algorithm in practical use for the multiplication of large integers.

In 1977, together with Robert Solovay , he published the Solovay-Strassen test, a probabilistic algorithm for determining whether a number is a prime number or not. The development of random algorithms was considered new and unusual at the time.

From 1988 until his retirement in 1998, Strassen was a professor at the University of Konstanz . He currently lives in Dresden and is an emeritus researcher on the theory of quantum physics.

Awards and memberships

• In 1974 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver ( Some results in algebraic complexity theory ) and also in Moscow in 1966 ( The sentence with the iterated logarithm ).
• In 1992 he was invited speaker at the European Congress of Mathematicians in Paris ( Algebra and Complexity ).
• 1992 member of the Leopoldina
• 1996 full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences
• In 1999 he was awarded the Georg Cantor Medal for outstanding scientific achievements in mathematics.
• In 2003 he received the Paris Kanellakis Prize of the Association for Computing Machinery for the Solovay Strassen test .
• In 2008 he was awarded the Knuth Prize by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) . The award was given in recognition of Strassen's groundbreaking contributions to the theory and application of algorithm development in the field of matrix multiplication and primality tests .
• 2011 Konrad Zuse Medal for services to computer science
• He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society .

Web links

• Volker Strassen in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
• Volker Strassen's website at the University of Konstanz with a list of publications
• Gaussian Elimination is not optimal (PDF file; 148 kB)
• Press release on the ACM's Kanellaki Prize

Individual evidence

1. ^ Gerd Fischer: A century of mathematics, 1890–1990: Festschrift for the anniversary of the DMV . Vieweg + Teubner Verlag, 1990, ISBN 3-528-06326-2 , p. 482.
2. ↑ Uni'Kon 09.2003 . Konstanz online publication system, URN . P. 24.
3. ^ Numerical Mathematics, Volume 13, 1969, pp. 354–356.
4. ↑ Schönhage, Strassen: Rapid Multiplication of Large Numbers , Computing, Volume 7, 1971, pp. 281–292.
5. ↑ Solovay, Strassen: A fast Monte-Carlo test for primality , SIAM Journal on Computing, Volume 6, 1977, pp. 84-85.
6. ↑ Member entry by Volker Strassen (with picture) at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on July 22, 2016.
7. ^ Gabriele Dörflinger: Mathematics in the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences . 2014, p. 80.
8. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from May 14, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.