Landon Curt Noll (born October 28, 1960) is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus ( ...

, co-discoverer of the 25th

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 ...

and discoverer of the 26th, which he found while still enrolled at Hayward High School and concurrently at California State University, Hayward.

Biography

Noll was born in

Walnut Creek, California Walnut Creek is a city in Contra Costa County, California, United States, located in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, about east of the city of Oakland. With a total population of 70,127 per the 2020 census, Walnut Creek s ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

. At age 18, he became the youngest person to break the record for the largest known prime. He has held or co-held the record three times. He is also the co-inventor (with

John Horton Conway John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branc ...

) of a system for naming arbitrarily large powers of 10. He also helped start the

International Obfuscated C Code Contest The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (abbreviated IOCCC) is a computer programming contest for the most creatively obfuscated C code. Held annually, it is described as "celebrating 'ssyntactical opaqueness". The winning code for the 27 ...

, and is a co-inventor of the Fowler Noll Vo hash function. He was also a member of the

Amdahl Six Amdahl may refer to: People * Einar Amdahl (1888-1974), Norwegian theologist * Bjarne Amdahl (1903-1968), Norwegian pianist and composer * Douglas K. Amdahl (1919–2010), American lawyer and judge from Minnesota * Gene Amdahl (1922–2015), formu ...

team (John S. Brown, Bodo Parady, Curt Landon Noll, Gene W. Smith, Joel F. Smith, and Sergio E. Zarantonello) which discovered another record prime in 1989; this prime remains unusual as a record large prime as it was not a Mersenne prime. Noll is an amateur astronomer. His work includes measuring the Solar parallax during the 2004

Transit of Venus frameless, upright=0.5 A transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and a superior planet, becoming visible against (and hence obscuring a small portion of) the solar disk. During a tra ...

as well as the search for Vulcanoid asteroids. He was also involved in politics as a

Sunnyvale, California Sunnyvale () is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwest Santa Clara County in the U.S. state of California. Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101 and is bordered by portions of San Jose to the no ...

city council member and vice-mayor.

Notes

External links

Landon Curt Noll's home page

Noll Primer Prover Bio

{{DEFAULTSORT:Noll, Landon Curt 1960 births Living people American astronomers 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Number theorists American cryptographers Modern cryptographers American computer scientists California State University, East Bay alumni Linfield University alumni California city council members Scientists from the San Francisco Bay Area People from Sunnyvale, California