I've now put my photos from Volker Strassen's Knuth Prize lecture at SODA online. I've also uploaded two of them to Wikimedia and used them to illustrate the Wikipedia articles for Strassen and the Knuth Prize; if anyone has a need for a freely-licensed version of any of the other photos, I'd be happy to upload them there as well.

Volker Strassen presenting the Knuth Prize lecture at SODA 2009

I already have something of a tradition of recording limericks that people have included in their technical talks, so, for the record, Strassen's was:

  • An E.T. residing on Vega
  • determined the size of ω.
    • In Praha, at night,
    • he told me that quite
  • positively ω was nega....

In the following slide, he encoded a conjecture that ω (the exponent in the time bound for matrix multiplication) is strictly greater than two into another poem. Fortunately, the quality of the poetry provided a lower bound, rather than an upper bound, on the quality of the rest of his talk.