CORTLANDT MANOR, NY, August 14, 2020 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Victor Pan with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. An accomplished listee, Victor Pan celebrates many years' experience in his professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes he has accrued in his field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Victor Pan is a researcher in Computational Mathematics and Computer Science. Since 1959 and through 2020 he has been prolific and made groundbreaking contributions at the fundamental and technical levels to these fields. He introduced a number of new insights and novel methods, revealed unexpected links among some seemingly distant subjects, and proposed new research directions and new areas of study.
Google Scholar and DBLP show his 4 books (1623+LXXIV pages overall), over 20 surveys in journals and book chapters, over 180 research articles in leading journals, and over 90 in refereed conference proceedings such as STOC, FOCS, SODA, ICALP, SPAA, CSR, ISSAC, CASC, and SNC.
Some concepts and definitions introduced in his papers (e.g., active operations and basic substitution) as well as his techniques and insights are commonly used, sometimes as folklore. His research, publications and service in the field helped establish synergistic links among various areas of computing, e.g., theoretical computer science, symbolic computations, numerical computations, and applied linear algebra. He guided 26 students to their successful PhD defense in Mathematics and Computer Science.
He was one of the founders of the popular fields of Algebraic Complexity of Computations and Symbolic-Numerical Computations, helped establishing other new areas of study, and enriched them by linking them together. He gained international fame by proving in 1963 (while being a sophomore) optimality of Horner's polynomial evaluation, by introducing novel techniques, now classical, but he received even wider accolades for his research breakthrough in 1978 onfast matrix multiplication: he became known worldwide and inspired fast progress in the field after almost a decade of stalemate. His feasible n-by-n matrix multiplication of 1982 for n_1,000,000,000 stays record fast today. Says Donald E. Knuth, a foremost expert: "His research on matrix multiplication was the most outstanding event in all of theoretical computer science during 1978. The problem he solved was not only a famous unsolved problem for many years, it also was worked on by all of the leading researchers in the field, worldwide. Pan's breakthrough was based on combination of brilliant ideas."
Pan stayed active and prolific throughout subsequent years, contributing to many areas of Computational Mathematics and Computer Science. His hierarchical aggregation (devised jointly with Miranker, 1980) was a basic step of the emergence of algebraic multigrid, now a popular field; his transformation of matrix structure of 1989 had high and lasting theoretical and practical importance, resonated with his much cited solution in 2016 of decades-long problem on Vandermonde matrices. Since 1995 he remains a leader in numerical polynomial root-finding -- the central subject of Mathematics and Computational Mathematics for four millennia, since Sumerian time, -- for which Pan proposed the first nearly optimal algorithm in 1995 and dramatically improved in 2020 the second such algorithm of 2016.
PROFESSIONAL RECOGNITION
Special Creativity Extension Award from the Numeric, Symbolic, and Geometric Computation Program of the CCR Division in the Directorate CISE of NSF (1993)
2000: Best Paper Award, Journal of Complexity
2013: Designation of Fellowship in American Math Society for "Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Computation"
NSF Grants for about $3,000,000 in 1980-2021.
Extensive citation in journals and books, and enthusiastic reviews and citations by experts in journals and magazine articles. Some of his works have been covered in the magazines Byte, Science, Science News, and American Scientist.
PERSONAL: Born in Moscow, Soviet Union, in 1939. Married Lidia Perelman in 1972. Emigrated to USA in 1976.
EDUCATION: 59th High School (famous for education in Mathematics) 1946-56. Moscow State University (MGU), Mech-Math Dept., headed by A.N. Kolmogorov, 1956-64. Degrees from MGU in Mathematics: MS in 1961 and PhD in 1964 (adviser A.G. Vitushkin).
EMPLOYMENT: 1988 – 2020: Professor and (since 2000) Distinguished Professor of the City University of New York (CUNY) (Lehman College and the Graduate Center). Before that he worked in Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, SU, 1969-76; and then in various places, in particular in IBM Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA; SUNY Albany, NY; Stanford and Columbia Universities; Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ; University of Pisa, Italy; INRIA, France.
In recognition of outstanding contributions to his profession and the Marquis Who's Who community, Victor Pan has been featured on the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
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