Samuel Yates (May 10, 1919 in Savannah, Georgia – April 22, 1991 in New Brunswick, New Jersey) was a computer engineer and

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 first described

unique prime The reciprocals of prime numbers have been of interest to mathematicians for various reasons. They do not have a finite sum, as Leonhard Euler proved in 1737. Like all rational numbers, the reciprocals of primes have repeating decimal represen ...

s in the 1980s. In 1984 he began the list of "Largest Known Primes" (today The

Prime Pages 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" ...

) and coined the name

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 ...

for any prime with 1,000 or more decimal digits. He also called those who proved their

primality 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 ...

"titans". He is the author of ''Repunits and Repetends''. Samuel Yatrofsky married May Berkowitz on April 5, 1941, in Brooklyn, NY, and along with his wife, brother and brother's wife, changed their surname from Yatrofsky to Yates on June 25, 1943, in Burlington County, New Jersey, due to anti-Semitism. He is buried in Beth Israel Jewish Cemetery in Woodbridge, NJ.

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* Number theorists 20th-century American mathematicians 1991 deaths 1919 births Scientists from Georgia (U.S. state) {{mathematician-stub