Victor Pan

Who is Victor Pan?

Victor Ya. Pan is a Soviet and American mathematician and computer scientist. He earned his Ph.D. at Moscow University then continued at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. During that time, he published a number of significant papers and became known informally as "polynomial Pan" for his pioneering work in the area of polynomial computations. In late 1970s, he immigrated in the United States and held positions at several institutions including IBM Research. Since 1988, he has taught at Lehman College of the City University of New York, where he was appointed Distinguished Professor in 2000.

Victor Pan is an expert in computational complexity and has developed a number of new algorithms. One of his notable early results is a proof that the number of multiplications in Horner scheme is optimal.

In 2013 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, for "contributions to the mathematical theory of computation".