Louis Bryant Tuckerman, III (November 28, 1915 – May 19, 2002) was an American mathematician, born in

Lincoln, Nebraska Lincoln is the capital city of the U.S. state of Nebraska and the county seat of Lancaster County. The city covers with a population of 292,657 in 2021. It is the second-most populous city in Nebraska and the 73rd-largest in the United Sta ...

. He was a member of the team that developed the

Data Encryption Standard The Data Encryption Standard (DES ) is a symmetric-key algorithm for the encryption of digital data. Although its short key length of 56 bits makes it too insecure for modern applications, it has been highly influential in the advancement of cry ...

(DES). He studied

topology In mathematics, topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is concerned with the properties of a mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformations, such ...

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine ...

, where he invented the

Tuckerman traverse In geometry, flexagons are flat models, usually constructed by folding strips of paper, that can be ''flexed'' or folded in certain ways to reveal faces besides the two that were originally on the back and front. Flexagons are usually square or ...

method for revealing all the faces of a

flexagon In geometry, flexagons are flat models, usually constructed by folding strips of paper, that can be ''flexed'' or folded in certain ways to reveal faces besides the two that were originally on the back and front. Flexagons are usually square or ...

. On March 4, 1971, he discovered the 24th

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 17t ...

, a

titanic prime A megaprime is a prime number with at least one million decimal digits. Other terms for large primes include titanic prime, coined by Samuel Yates in the 1980s for a prime with at least 1000 digits, and gigantic prime for a prime with at least 10 ...

, with a value of :

2^-1

References

External links

Tuckerman Obituary
20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 1915 births 2002 deaths IBM employees People from Briarcliff Manor, New York Mathematicians from New York (state) {{US-mathematician-stub