Michael Somos 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 ...

, who was a visiting scholar in the

Georgetown University Georgetown University is a private university, private Jesuit research university in Washington, D.C., United States. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic higher education, Ca ...

Mathematics and Statistics department for four years and is a visiting scholar at The

Catholic University of America The Catholic University of America (CUA) is a private Catholic research university in Washington, D.C., United States. It is one of two pontifical universities of the Catholic Church in the United States – the only one that is not primarily a ...

. In the late eighties he proposed a conjecture about certain polynomial recurrences, now called

Somos sequence In mathematics, a Somos sequence is a sequence of numbers defined by a certain recurrence relation, described below. They were discovered by mathematician Michael Somos. From the form of their defining recurrence (which involves division), one wou ...

s, that surprisingly in some cases contain only integers. Somos' quadratic recurrence constant is also named after him.

Notes

References

* Michael Somos and Robert Haas, "A Linked Pair of Sequences Implies the Primes Are Infinite", ''

The American Mathematical Monthly ''The American Mathematical Monthly'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal of mathematics. It was established by Benjamin Finkel in 1894 and is published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the Mathematical Association of America. It is an exposito ...

'', volume 110, number 6 (June – July, 2003), pp. 539–540

External links

Michael Somos's homepage

The Troublemaker Number
''

Numberphile ''Numberphile'' is an Educational entertainment, educational YouTube channel featuring videos that explore topics from a variety of fields of mathematics. In the early days of the channel, each video focused on a specific number, but the channe ...

'' video on the Somos sequences Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Combinatorialists Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-mathematician-stub