Mathematician:Derrick Henry Lehmer

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, and married to. Factorised Jevons' number.

One of the victims of the McCarthy witch-hunt.

Nationality
American

History

 * Born: February 23, 1905
 * Died: May 22, 1991

Theorems and Definitions

 * Lehmer's Constant
 * Lehmer's Polynomial


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

Publications

 * 1930: An Extended Theory of Lucas' Functions (PhD thesis)






 * 1941: On the first case of Fermat's Last Theorem (with )







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

Also known as
Known informally as Dick Lehmer.