Derrick Henry Lehmer

Derrick Henry Lehmer

Derrick Henry "Dick" Lehmer (February 23, 1905 – May 22, 1991) was an American mathematician who refined Édouard Lucas' work in the 1930s and devised the Lucas–Lehmer test for Mersenne primes. Lehmer's peripatetic career as a number theorist, with he and his wife taking numerous types of work in the United States and abroad to support themselves during the Great Depression, fortuitously brought him into the center of research into early electronic computing.