Bryant Tuckerman

Louis Bryant Tuckerman III (born November 28, 1915 in Lincoln , Nebraska , † May 19, 2002 in Briarcliff Minor , New York ) was an American mathematician and cryptologist .

He was the son of Louis Bryant Tuckerman II, a physicist and materials scientist with the National Bureau of Standards. He studied mathematics at Princeton University , interrupted by development work on navigation for tanks during World War II. In 1947 he received his doctorate from Princeton with a thesis on topology ( The Embedding of Products and Joins of Complexes in Euclidean Spaces ). He then taught mathematics at Cornell University and Oberlin College for several years, and then joined John von Neumann's computer group at the Institute for Advanced Study , where he stayed for five years. He spent the rest of his career doing research as a mathematician at IBM at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center .

In the 1970s he was part of the team that developed the Data Encryption Standard . At IBM, he also dealt a lot with cryptography and data security.

In 1962 he published historical ephemeris tables on the sun, moon and planets from 601 BC to 1649 AD. They were used in particular by historians. In 1971 he discovered the 24th Mersenne prime . At the time, that was the largest known prime.

As a student at Princeton, he and other fellow students (such as John W. Tukey , Richard Feynman ) also devoted himself to the paper folding game Flexagon (and its topological aspects), which the British student Arthur Harold Stone introduced there in 1939. The game was later popularized by Martin Gardner .

Web links

• Obituary at SIAM
• Literature by and about Bryant Tuckerman in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

1. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project