John L. Selfridge

John Lewis Selfridge (born February 17, 1927 in Ketchikan , Alaska , † October 31, 2010 , DeKalb , Illinois ) was an American mathematician who dealt with algorithmic number theory , analytical number theory and combinatorics .

Selfridge received his PhD in 1958 from the University of California, Los Angeles with Theodore Motzkin ( On finite semigroups ). From 1971 he was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then at Northern Illinois University . In 1991 he retired.

In 1962 he found the first Sierpiński number : 78557, one of the infinitely many such numbers according to Waclaw Sierpinski (1960). Selfridge also suspected with Sierpinski in 1967 that the number he found is the smallest Sierpinski number, a still open "Sierpinski" problem, which, however, is being addressed in a distributed computing project ( Seventeen or Bust ) (at the end of 2016 there were still five cases open). In 1967 he improved the Lucas test with John Brillhart , and in 1975 he published a new prime number test with Derrick Henry Lehmer and Brillhart. Independently of Gary L. Miller and Michael O. Rabin , he found the Miller-Rabin test in 1974 . With Brillhart, Lehmer, Samuel Wagstaff and others he was involved in the Cunningham project (factorization of numbers of the form ± 1 for certain what was published in tables). ${\ displaystyle b ^ {n}}$ ${\ displaystyle b}$

Selfridge published several times with Paul Erdős , including the Erdős-Selfridge theorem . He thus has the Erdős number 1.

From 1978 to 1986 he was editor of Mathematical Reviews . He is a co-founder of the Number Theory Foundation, a US society for the advancement of number theory. Every two years since 1994, it has been awarding a prize named after him in honor of Selfridge at the Algorithmic Number Theory Symposium (ANTS).

Web links

Homepage

References

^ Brillhart, Selfridge: Some factorizations of ± 1 and some related results ${\ displaystyle 2 ^ {m}}$ . Mathematics of Computation, Volume 21, 1967, pp. 87-96, Corrigendum p. 751
^ Brillhart, Lehmer, Selfridge: New Primality criteria and factorizations of ± 1 ${\ displaystyle 2 ^ {m}}$ . Mathematics of Computation, volume. 29, 1975, pp. 620-647

personal data
SURNAME	Selfridge, John L.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Selfridge, John Lewis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH	February 17, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH	Ketchikan , Alaska
DATE OF DEATH	October 31, 2010
Place of death	DeKalb (Illinois)

[1] Brillhart, Selfridge: Some factorizations of ± 1 and some related results ${\ displaystyle 2 ^ {m}}$ . Mathematics of Computation, Volume 21, 1967, pp. 87-96, Corrigendum p. 751

[2] Brillhart, Lehmer, Selfridge: New Primality criteria and factorizations of ± 1 ${\ displaystyle 2 ^ {m}}$ . Mathematics of Computation, volume. 29, 1975, pp. 620-647