Hans Ivar Riesel (May 28, 1929 in Stockholm – December 21, 2014) was a Swedish mathematician who discovered the 18th Mersenne prime in 1957, using the computer BESK:^[1][2] this prime is 2³²¹⁷-1 and consists of 969 digits. He held the record for the largest known prime from 1957 to 1961, when Alexander Hurwitz discovered a larger one.^[3] Riesel also discovered the Riesel numbers as well as developing the Lucas–Lehmer–Riesel test. After having worked at the Swedish Board for Computing Machinery, he was awarded his Ph.D. from Stockholm University in 1969 for his thesis Contributions to numerical number theory,^[4][5] and in the same year joined the Royal Institute of Technology as a senior lecturer and associate professor.

Selected publications

• Riesel, Hans (1994). Prime Numbers and Computer Methods for factorization. Progress in Mathematics. Vol. 126 (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Birkhäuser. ISBN 0-8176-3743-5. Zbl 0821.11001.

See also

• Riesel number
• Riesel Sieve

References

External links

• Riesel's web page
• Obituary

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