Curtis Niles Cooper 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 professor at the
University of Central Missouri
The University of Central Missouri (UCM) is a public university in Warrensburg, Missouri, United States.
In 2024, enrollment was 13,734 students from 48 states and 52 countries on its 1,561-acre campus. UCM offers 150 programs of study, incl ...
, in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science.
GIMPS
Using software from the
GIMPS project, Cooper and Steven Boone found the 43rd known
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 1 ...
on their 700
PC cluster
may refer to:
Science and technology Astronomy
* Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft
* Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study the magnetosphere
* Asteroid cluster, a small ...
on December 15, 2005. The prime, 2
30,402,457 − 1, is 9,152,052 digits long and is the ninth Mersenne prime for GIMPS.
Cooper and Boone became the first GIMPS contributors to find two primes when they also found the 44th known Mersenne prime, 2
32,582,657 − 1 (or M
32,582,657), which has 9,808,358 digits. This prime was discovered on September 4, 2006, using a PC cluster of over 850 machines. This is the tenth Mersenne prime for GIMPS.
On January 25, 2013, Cooper found his third Mersenne prime of 2
57,885,161 − 1.
On September 17, 2015, Cooper's computer reported yet another Mersenne prime, 2
74,207,281 − 1, which was the
largest known prime number
The largest known prime number is , a number which has 41,024,320 digits when written in the decimal system. It was found on October 12, 2024, on a cloud-based virtual machine volunteered by Luke Durant, a 36-year-old researcher from San Jose, Cali ...
at 22,338,618 decimal digits. The report was, however, unnoticed until January 7, 2016.
Areas of research
Cooper's own work has mainly been in elementary
number theory
Number theory is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and arithmetic functions. Number theorists study prime numbers as well as the properties of mathematical objects constructed from integers (for example ...
, especially work related to digital representations of numbers. He collaborated extensively with Robert E. Kennedy. They have worked with
Niven numbers, among other results, showing that no 21 consecutive integers can all be Niven numbers, and introduced the notion of
tau numbers, numbers whose total number of divisors are itself a divisor of the number. Independent of Kennedy, Cooper has also done work about generalizations of
geometric series
In mathematics, a geometric series is a series (mathematics), series summing the terms of an infinite geometric sequence, in which the ratio of consecutive terms is constant. For example, 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ⋯, the series \tfrac12 + \tfrac1 ...
, and their application to
probability
Probability is a branch of mathematics and statistics concerning events and numerical descriptions of how likely they are to occur. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1; the larger the probability, the more likely an e ...
.
[.]
Cooper is also the editor of the publication ''
Fibonacci Quarterly
The ''Fibonacci Quarterly'' is a scientific journal on mathematical topics related to the Fibonacci numbers, published four times per year. It is the primary publication of The Fibonacci Association, which has published it since 1963. Its founding ...
''.
Notes
External links
*
Curtis Cooper's homepage
Living people
Iowa State University alumni
University of Central Missouri faculty
21st-century American mathematicians
American number theorists
Year of birth missing (living people)
Place of birth missing (living people)
Mathematicians from Missouri
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