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, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

, who was a visiting scholar in the

Georgetown University Georgetown University is a private university, private research university in the Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789 as Georg ...

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

Catholic University of America The Catholic University of America (CUA) is a private Roman Catholic research university in Washington, D.C. It is a pontifical university of the Catholic Church in the United States and the only institution of higher education founded by U.S. ...

. 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 In mathematics, Somos' quadratic recurrence constant, named after Michael Somos, is the number :\sigma = \sqrt = 1^\;2^\; 3^ \cdots.\, This can be easily re-written into the far more quickly converging product representation :\sigma = \sigma ...

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 mathematical journal founded by Benjamin Finkel in 1894. It is published ten times each year by Taylor & Francis for the Mathematical Association of America. The ''American Mathematical Monthly'' is an e ...

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

External links

Michael Somos's homepage

The Troublemaker Number
''

Numberphile ''Numberphile'' is an 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 channel has since expanded its s ...

'' 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