John Selfridge
| John Selfridge | |
|---|---|
| Born |
February 17, 1927 Ketchikan, Alaska, United States |
| Died | October 31, 2010 (aged 83) |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Analytic number theory |
| Institutions |
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Northern Illinois University |
| Alma mater | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Doctoral advisor | Theodore Motzkin |
John Lewis Selfridge (February 17, 1927 in Ketchikan, Alaska – October 31, 2010 in DeKalb, Illinois), was an American mathematician who contributed to the fields of analytic number theory, computational number theory, and combinatorics. He co-authored 14 papers with Paul Erdős (giving him an Erdős number of 1).
Selfridge received his Ph.D. in 1958 from the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Theodore Motzkin.
In 1962, he proved that 78,557 is a Sierpinski number; he showed that, when k=78,557, all numbers of the form k2n + 1 have a factor in the covering set {3, 5, 7, 13, 19, 37, 73}. Five years later, he and Sierpiński proposed the conjecture that 78,557 is the smallest Sierpinski number, and thus the answer to the Sierpinski problem. A distributed computing project called Seventeen or Bust is currently trying to prove this statement, as of April 2016[update] only six of the original seventeen possibilities remain.
In 1975 John Brillhart, Derrick Henry Lehmer and Selfridge developed a method of proving the primality of p given only partial factorizations of p − 1 and p + 1. Together with Samuel Wagstaff they also all participated in the Cunningham project.
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