Paul T. Bateman

Paul Trevier Bateman (1919 to 2012) was an American number theorist, known for formulating the Bateman-Horn conjecture on the density of prime number values generated by systems of polynomials and the New Mersenne conjecture relating the occurrences of Mersenne primes and Wagstaff primes. Born in Philadelphia on 6 June 1919, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1946 under Hans Rademacher, held temporary positions at Yale University and the Institute for Advanced Study, and joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1950, where he chaired the mathematics department for 15 years. He advised 20 doctoral students, including Marvin Knopp, Kevin McCurley, George B. Purdy and Claudia Spiro, co-authored the textbook Analytic Number Theory: An Introductory Course, and served as Problems editor of The American Mathematical Monthly from 1986 to 1991.