Allan Joseph Champneys Cunningham

Allan Joseph Champneys Cunningham (* 1842 in Delhi , † 1928 in London ) was a British mathematician.

He began his military career with the Bengali engineers of the East India Company . From 1871 to 1881 Cunningham was a math teacher at the Thomason Engineering School in Roorkee, India . When he returned to Great Britain in 1881, he continued teaching at the military academies in Chatham , Dublin and Shorncliffe . In 1891 he left the army, in which he last had the rank of lieutenant colonel (Lieutenant Colonel).

Cunningham spent the rest of his life studying number theory . He used his experience to solve factorization problems such as factoring Mersenne numbers 2 ^p -1 and Fermat numbers . He published the result of decades of calculations in several tables. According to him, Cunningham chains named. ${\displaystyle 2^{2^{n}}+1}$

His work will be continued in the Cunningham Project named after him .

literature

• AE Western, J. London Math. Soc. 317-318 (1928)
• Raymond Clare Archibald : Mathematical table makers , New York 1948, pp. 18–21 (bibliography)

Fonts

• Binomial Factorizations: Giving extensive congruence tables and factorization tables . London: Francis Hodgson, seven volumes until 1925
• A binary canon, showing residues of powers of 2 for divisors under 1000, and indices to residues , London: Hodgson and son, 1900
• Quadratic partitions . London: Hodgson 1904

He also published a book on hydraulic experiments at Thomason College in 1875 (then with the rank of captain) and a textbook on Applied Mechanics at Rourkee in 1876.

Web links

• Allan Joseph Champneys Cunningham on Number Theory Web