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.
[1] For important contributions to the analysis of algorithms he has received many awards, including the Cantor medal,[2] the Konrad Zuse Medal,[3] the Paris Kanellakis Award for work on randomized primality testing,[4] the Knuth Prize for "seminal and influential contributions to the design and analysis of efficient algorithms.
[4] 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.
Strassen is also known for his 1977 work with Robert M. Solovay on the Solovay–Strassen primality test, the first method to show that testing whether a number is prime can be performed in randomized polynomial time and one of the first results to show the power of randomized algorithms more generally.
[4] In 2008 he was awarded the Knuth Prize for "seminal and influential contributions to the design and analysis of efficient algorithms.