Derrick Henry Lehmer

Derrick Henry Lehmer, almost always cited as D. H. Lehmer, was an American mathematician significant to the development of computational number theory, born on 23 February 1905 and died on 22 May 1991. He refined Edouard Lucas' work in the 1930s and devised the Lucas-Lehmer test for Mersenne primes. His career as a number theorist, taking varied work in the United States and abroad with his wife during the Great Depression, brought him into the center of research into early electronic computing, which is why he belongs among the people who shaped how computers were applied to mathematics.