Mathematician:Derrick Henry Lehmer

Derrick Henry ("Dick") Lehmer was an 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

 * Lucas-Lehmer Test (with Édouard Lucas)
 * Lehmer-Schur Algorithm (with Issai Schur)

Books and Papers

 * 1930: An Extended Theory of Lucas' Functions (PhD thesis)
 * 1941: On the first case of Fermat's Last Theorem (with Emma Lehmer)

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."