Derrick Henry Lehmer

Derrick Henry Lehmer, known as Dick Lehmer and almost always cited as D. H. Lehmer, lived from 23 February 1905 to 22 May 1991. He was an American mathematician significant to the development of computational number theory. In the 1930s he refined Edouard Lucas' work and devised the Lucas-Lehmer test for Mersenne primes. His peripatetic career as a number theorist, in which he and his wife took 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.