Landon Curt Noll

Landon Curt Noll (born 1960) is an American computer scientist. As a student at Hayward High School and California State University, Hayward, he co-discovered the 25th Mersenne prime and discovered the 26th, and at eighteen he became the youngest person to break the record for the largest known prime; he has held or co-held that record three times. He is a co-inventor of the Fowler Noll Vo hash function, helped start the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, and with John Horton Conway devised a system for naming arbitrarily large powers of ten. He was also a member of the Amdahl Six team that found another record prime in 1989, one that was not a Mersenne prime. Beyond computing he is an amateur astronomer who measured the solar parallax during the 2004 transit of Venus and searched for Vulcanoid asteroids, and he served as a Sunnyvale, California city council member and vice-mayor.