Mathematician:Derrick Henry Lehmer
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Mathematician
American mathematician active mainly in the field of number theory.
Most famous for designing the Lucas-Lehmer Test for determining the primality of Mersenne numbers.
The son of Derrick Norman Lehmer, and married to Emma Lehmer, née Trotskaia.
One of the victims of the McCarthy witch-hunt.
Nationality
American
History
- Born: February 23, 1905
- Died: May 22, 1991
Theorems and Definitions
Results named for Derrick Henry Lehmer can be found here.
Definitions of concepts named for Derrick Henry Lehmer can be found here.
Publications
- 1930: An Extended Theory of Lucas' Functions (PhD thesis)
- 1933: Factorisation of certain cyclotomic functions (Ann. Math. Ser. 2 Vol. 34: pp. 461 – 479) www.jstor.org/stable/1968172
- 1938: A Cotangent Analogue of Continued Fractions (Duke Math. J. Vol. 4: pp. 323 – 340)
- 1941: On the first case of Fermat's Last Theorem (with Emma Lehmer)
- Jul. 1947: Recent Mathematical Tables (Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation Vol. 2, no. 19: pp. 297 – 311) www.jstor.org/stable/2002589
- 1983: Factorizations of $b^n \pm 1$ up to high powers (Contemporary Mathematics Vol. 22: pp. 1 – 178) (with John Brillhart, Samuel S. Wagstaff Jr., John L. Selfridge and Bryant Tuckerman)
- 1985: Interesting Series Involving the Central Binomial Coefficient (Amer. Math. Monthly Vol. 92: pp. 449 – 457) www.jstor.org/stable/2322496
- 1988: Factorizations of $b^n \pm 1, b = 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12$ up to high powers (2nd ed.) (Contemporary Mathematics Vol. 22: pp. 1 – 226) (with John Brillhart, Samuel S. Wagstaff Jr., John L. Selfridge and Bryant Tuckerman)
Notable Quotes
- General rules for programming have been discovered. Most of them have been used in the Kansas City freight yards for a long time.
- -- Quoted at the end of Section 2.6 of 1968: Donald E. Knuth: The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms
Also known as
Known informally as Dick Lehmer.