Curtis Niles Cooper is an American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

. He currently is a professor at the

University of Central Missouri The University of Central Missouri (UCM) is a public university in Warrensburg, Missouri. In 2019, enrollment was 11,229 students from 49 states and 59 countries on its 1,561-acre campus. UCM offers 150 programs of study, including 10 pre-profe ...

, in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science.

GIMPS

Using software from the

GIMPS The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) is a collaborative project of volunteers who use freely available software to search for Mersenne prime numbers. GIMPS was founded in 1996 by George Woltman, who also wrote the Prime95 client and ...

project, Cooper and Steven Boone found the 43rd known

Mersenne prime In mathematics, a Mersenne prime is a prime number that is one less than a power of two. That is, it is a prime number of the form for some integer . They are named after Marin Mersenne, a French Minim friar, who studied them in the early 17 ...

on their 700 PC

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Asteroid cluster, a small asteroid family * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study th ...

on December 15, 2005. The prime, 2^30,402,457 − 1, is 9,152,052 digits long and is the ninth Mersenne prime for GIMPS. Cooper and Boone became the first GIMPS contributors to find two primes when they also found the 44th known Mersenne prime, 2^32,582,657 − 1 (or M_32,582,657), which has 9,808,358 digits . This prime was discovered on September 4, 2006 using a PC cluster of over 850 machines. This is the tenth Mersenne prime for GIMPS. On January 25, 2013, Cooper found his third Mersenne prime of 2^57,885,161 − 1. On September 17, 2015, Cooper's computer reported yet another Mersenne prime, 2^74,207,281 - 1, which was the

largest known prime number The largest known prime number () is , a number which has 24,862,048 digits when written in base 10. It was found via a computer volunteered by Patrick Laroche of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) in 2018. A prime number is a pos ...

at 22,338,618 decimal digits. The report was, however, unnoticed until January 7, 2016.

Areas of research

Cooper's own work has mainly been in elementary

number theory Number theory (or arithmetic or higher arithmetic in older usage) is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and integer-valued functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) said, "Math ...

, especially work related to digital representations of numbers. He collaborated extensively with Robert E. Kennedy. They have worked with

Niven number Niven is a surname. It is derived from the Scottish Gaelic ''Mac Cnaimhin''. Hanks; Coates; McClure (2016) p. 1941. Notable people * Archibald C. Niven, US politician * Alan Niven, rock n roll composer, producer and manager Guns n Roses, Great Whi ...

s, among other results, showing that no 21 consecutive integers can all be Niven numbers, and introduced the notion of

tau number A refactorable number or tau number is an integer ''n'' that is divisible by the count of its divisors, or to put it algebraically, ''n'' is such that \tau(n)\mid n. The first few refactorable numbers are listed in as : 1, 2, 8, 9, 12, 18, ...

s, numbers whose total number of divisors are itself a divisor of the number. Independent of Kennedy, Cooper has also done work about generalizations of

geometric series In mathematics, a geometric series is the sum of an infinite number of terms that have a constant ratio between successive terms. For example, the series :\frac \,+\, \frac \,+\, \frac \,+\, \frac \,+\, \cdots is geometric, because each su ...

, and their application to

probability Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an Event (probability theory), event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and ...

.. Cooper is also the editor of the publication ''

Fibonacci Quarterly The ''Fibonacci Quarterly'' is a scientific journal on mathematical topics related to the Fibonacci numbers, published four times per year. It is the primary publication of The Fibonacci Association, which has published it since 1963. Its founding ...

''.

Notes

External links

*
Curtis Cooper's homepage
Living people Iowa State University alumni University of Central Missouri faculty 21st-century American mathematicians Number theorists Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) Mathematicians from Missouri {{US-mathematician-stub