Julia was auditing a class of Alfred Tarski's in which the person who always arranged to sit next to her was a young Ph.D. from Göttingen, a probabalist then, named Volker Strassen. She told him that her sister was planning to write a book about men and women of modern mathematics, and Volker said that of course then we must come to Göttingen and when we came he would show us around. ... Volker's Ph.D. adviser, Konrad Jacobs, was eager to entertain us - rather, to entertain Julia. It was clear that Volker had scored a coup with his "Doktorvater" by bringing her to Göttingen. ... Volker himself, whose wife was momentarily expecting their second child, told us that if the baby was a girl ... he was going to name her Julia. The baby was born while we were still in Göttingen but turned out to be a boy, so Volker named him Tyko after Tycho Brahe, which showed me the class Julia was in as far as Volker was concerned.

Perhaps the first real surprise in algorithm analysis occurred with Strassen's discovery in 1968 of a new method for multiplying two $n \times n$ matrices. While the classic algorithm we all learned in high school requires $2n^{3} - n^{2}$ scalar arithmetic operations, Strassen's algorithm uses fewer than $7n^{k} - 6n^{2}$ operations, where $k = \log_{2} 7 = 2.808$. Therefore, this new algorithm uses fewer operations than the classic method when $n$ is greater than 654. Strassen's discovery touched off an intensive search for asymptotically better matrix multiplication algorithms.

The Society honours a great scientist who through his multifaceted contributions has given mathematical research decisive impulses and has opened up new areas. His work in probability theory, algebraic complexity theory, and theoretical computer science has been groundbreaking. Those results will always be linked to his name.

Randomized algorithms for testing whether a number is prime were introduced by Robert Solovay and Volker Strassen and by Michael Rabin. Each of these tests is based on an efficiently computable predicate depending on $n$, the number being tested for primality, and an integer $b$ in the range $[ 2, n]$. In each case, the chosen predicate has the property that, if $n$ is prime, then the predicate must be true for all $b$; therefore, a value $b$ for which the predicate is false is a witness to the compositeness of $n$. Solovay and Strassen (1977) proved that, if $n$ is composite then, for their predicate, at least half the possible choices of $b$ are witnesses to its compositeness. ... The Solovay-Strassen and Miller-Rabin tests demonstrate the power of randomized algorithms and make it possible to generate large random prime numbers and thus construct candidate instances of the RSA cryptosystem. Essentially all cryptographic systems being considered today require the generation of large primes.

... for his contributions to the theory and practice of algorithm design. Strassen's innovations enabled fast and efficient computer algorithms, the sequence of instructions that tells a computer how to solve a particular problem. His discoveries resulted in some of the most important algorithms used today on millions if not billions of computers around the world, and fundamentally altered the field of cryptography, which uses secret codes to protect data from theft or alteration. ... Strassen's algorithms include fast matrix multiplication, integer multiplication, and a test for the primality of integers. The discovery of provably fast algorithms to determine whether a number is prime or composite profoundly changed the cryptography field. These primality tests are now performed billions of times a day on machines worldwide to apply cryptographic methods that make data secure. The primality test opened the world of probabilistic algorithms to theoretical computer scientists, presenting an innovative way to solve sharing problems, which are often used in fault tolerant systems. ... Modern primality tests involve multiplying many large integers together. For thirty five years, the Schonhage-Strassen integer multiplication method algorithm held the world record for the fastest multiplication algorithm. It is still a standard tool for computing with very large numbers. In 1969, Strassen discovered a novel way to multiply two matrices, a critical element of linear algebra that is pervasive throughout the sciences. It is an intricate yet simple algorithm that remains the method of choice for multiplying dense matrices of size 30 by 30 or more on machines today. Using this new matrix multiplication routine, Strassen was able to show that Gaussian elimination (an efficient algorithm for solving systems of linear equations) is not an optimal solution. Few students in computer science have not encountered Strassen's multiplication algorithm in their undergraduate program. Researchers in algorithm design have regularly used his method to improve the run time of their algorithms. In addition to his very practical work, Strassen has proved fundamental theorems in statistics, including "Strassen's law of the iterated logarithm" and the principle of strong invariance. He is considered the founding father of algebraic complexity theory with his work on the degree bound, connecting complexity to algebraic geometry. He also introduced fundamental notions and results in bilinear complexity and tensor rank.