Ralph Ernest Powers (April 27, 1875 – January 31, 1952) was an American amateur mathematician who worked on

prime numbers A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways ...

. He is credited with discovering the

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 ...

s and , in 1911 and 1914 respectively. In 1934 he verified that the Mersenne number is composite.

Life

Powers was born in Fountain, Colorado Territory. Details of his life are little-known,Obituary
by

D. H. Lehmer Derrick Henry "Dick" Lehmer (February 23, 1905 – May 22, 1991), almost always cited as D.H. Lehmer, was an American mathematician significant to the development of computational number theory. Lehmer refined Édouard Lucas' work in the 1930s and ...

though he appears to have been an employee of the

Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad The Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad , often shortened to ''Rio Grande'', D&RG or D&RGW, formerly the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, was an American Class I railroad company. The railroad started as a narrow-gauge line running south from ...

. Soon after Powers announced the discovery of , the Frenchman E. Fauquembergue claimed that he had discovered it earlier, but many of Fauquembergue's other claims were later demonstrated as erroneous; thus, many prefer recognizing Powers as the discoverer, including the well-known Internet resource the

PrimePages The PrimePages is a website about prime numbers maintained by Chris Caldwell at the University of Tennessee at Martin. The site maintains the list of the "5,000 largest known primes", selected smaller primes of special forms, and many "top twenty" ...

. After his own discoveries of Mersenne primes in 1911 and 1914, no

Mersenne primes 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 17t ...

were discovered until

Raphael M. Robinson Raphael Mitchel Robinson (November 2, 1911 – January 27, 1995) was an United States of America, American mathematician. Born in National City, California, National City, California, Robinson was the youngest of four children of a lawyer and a t ...

used a computer to find the next two, on January 30, 1952, the night before Powers's death.

Works

* ‘The Tenth Perfect Number', ''American Mathematical Monthly'', Vol. 18 (1911), pp. 195–7 * ’On Mersenne's Numbers', ''Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society'', Vol. 13 (1914), p. xxxix * 'A Mersenne Prime', ''Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society'', Vol. 20, No. 10 (1914), p. 531 * ’Certain composite Mersenne's numbers', ''Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society'' Vol. 15 (1916), p. xxii * (with

) 'On Factoring Large Numbers', ''Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society'', Vol. 37. No. 10 (1931), pp. 770–76 * ’Note on a Mersenne Number', ''Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society'', Vol. 40, No. 12 (1934), p. 883

References

External links

The Prime Pages website

* ttp://primes.utm.edu/mersenne/LukeMirror/lit/lit_002.txt The Tenth Perfect Number an article by Powers announcing the primality of ''M''₈₉ 1875 births 1952 deaths Number theorists {{US-mathematician-stub

Life

Works

See also

References

External links