Volker Strassen

Volker Strassen
Volker Strassen giving the Knuth Prize lecture at SODA 2009
Born	(1936-04-29) April 29, 1936 (age 80) Düsseldorf-Gerresheim, Germany
Nationality	German
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Konstanz
Alma mater	University of Göttingen
Doctoral advisor	Konrad Jacobs ()
Doctoral students	Peter Bürgisser Joos Heintz Joachim von zur Gathen

Volker Strassen (born April 29, 1936) is a German mathematician, a professor emeritus in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Konstanz.

For important contributions to the analysis of algorithms he has received many awards, including the Cantor medal, the Konrad Zuse Medal, the Paris Kanellakis Award for work on randomized primality testing, the Knuth Prize for "seminal and influential contributions to the design and analysis of efficient algorithms."

Strassen was born on April 29, 1936, in Düsseldorf-Gerresheim. After studying music, philosophy, physics, and mathematics at several German universities, he received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1962 from the University of Göttingen under the supervision of Konrad Jacobs (). He then took a position in the department of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley while performing his habilitation at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where Jacobs had since moved. In 1968, Strassen moved to the Institute of Applied Mathematics at the University of Zurich, where he remained for twenty years before moving to the University of Konstanz in 1988. He retired in 1998.

Strassen began his researches as a probabilist; his 1964 paper An Invariance Principle for the Law of the Iterated Logarithm defined a functional form of the law of the iterated logarithm, showing a form of scale invariance in random walks. This result, now known as Strassen's invariance principle or as Strassen's law of the iterated logarithm, has been highly cited and led to a 1966 presentation at the International Congress of Mathematicians.