Rasmus Pagh was born in Copenhagen,^[1] but soon after his family moved to Esbjerg in western Denmark. He went to high school at Rødkilde Amtsgymnasium where he participated in the "JP Forsker" science competition, and in the "Georg Mohr" mathematics competition. After graduating in 1994, he went to study mathematics and computer science at Aarhus University. In 1998 he started his PhD with Peter Bro Miltersen and started writing articles about hashing and efficient dictionaries, culminating in his work on cuckoo hashing. Soon after his thesis defence was in the fall of 2002 he became an assistant professor at the recently founded IT University of Copenhagen.

In 2007, Rasmus founded the Scalable Query Evaluation for Reliable Databases (SQERD) project. The project aimed at applying modern algorithmic techniques to problems arising in database management systems in connection with the evaluation of queries. From 2011-2015, he ran the MaDaMS project, which partnered with Demetra A/S, Aarhus University and Apptus AB at finding more efficient approaches to data mining.^[2]

Rasmus Pagh was made full professor at ITU with his Inaugural Lecture^[3] in 2013. In 2014, he received an ERC Consolidator Grant for a project on Scalable Similarity Search.^[4][5] The project resulted in many new algorithms, including a way to prevent false negatives in high dimensional search.^[6] In 2017 Pagh co-founded the Basic Algorithms Research Center, BARC, in Copenhagen^[7] with Mikkel Thorup, Thore Husfeldt and Stephen Alstrup. Soon thereafter he took a sabbatical to join the Simons Institute at University of California, Berkeley^[8] and become a Google visiting scholar.^[9]

In 2019, Rasmus Pagh became an Associate Editor of the SIAM Journal on Computing.^[10]

In 2020, Rasmus Pagh received the European Symposium on Algorithms Test-of-Time award for his 2001 work on cuckoo hashing with Flemming Friche Rodler.^[11]

• Pagh's problem in dynamic algorithms.