- published: 22 Jan 2016
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Derrick Henry "Dick" Lehmer (February 23, 1905 – May 22, 1991) was an American mathematician who refined Édouard Lucas' work in the 1930s and devised the Lucas–Lehmer test for Mersenne primes. Lehmer's peripatetic career as a number theorist, with he and his wife taking numerous types of work in the United States and abroad to support themselves during the Great Depression, fortuitously brought him into the center of research into early electronic computing.
Lehmer was born in Berkeley, California, to Derrick Norman Lehmer, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Clara Eunice Mitchell.
He studied physics and earned a Bachelor degree from UC Berkeley, and continued with graduate studies at the University of Chicago.
He and his father worked together on Lehmer sieves.
During his studies at Berkeley, Lehmer met Emma Markovna Trotskaia, a Russian student of his father's, who had begun with work toward an engineering degree but had subsequently switched focus to mathematics, earning her B.A. in 1928. Later that same year, Lehmer married Emma and, following a tour of Northern California and a trip to Japan to meet Emma's family, they moved by car to Providence, Rhode Island, after Brown University offered him an instructorship.