Frank Nelson Cole

Frank Nelson Cole, who lived from 20 September 1861 to 26 May 1926, was an American mathematician most famous for discovering the factors of the Mersenne number two to the 67th power minus one. Born in Ashland, Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard in 1882, studied at Leipzig under Felix Klein from 1883 to 1885 and presented his thesis at Harvard before teaching at the University of Michigan and, from 1895 until his death, at Columbia University. He served as Secretary of the American Mathematical Society from 1895 and as an editor of its Bulletin from 1897. On 31 October 1903 he gave a famous silent lecture at an American Mathematical Society meeting in which he multiplied 193,707,721 by 761,838,257,287 on the blackboard to show that they gave that number, work he later said had cost him three years of Sundays. The society's Cole Prizes in algebra and number theory are named in his honor.