Bryant Tuckerman

Louis Bryant Tuckerman III ( born November 28, 1915 in Lincoln (Nebraska ), † 19 May 2002 Briarcliff Minor, New York ) was an American mathematician and cryptologist.

He was the son of Louis Bryant Tuckerman II, a physicist and materials scientist at the National Bureau of Standards. He studied at Princeton University Mathematics, interrupted by development work on navigation for tanks during World War II. In 1947 he received his doctorate at Princeton with a thesis on topology (The embedding of Products and joins of Complexes in Euclidean spaces). After that, he taught mathematics for several years at Cornell University and at Oberlin College and then joined the Computer Group by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study at where he remained for five years. The rest of his career, he worked as a research mathematician at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

In the 1970s he was there for the team that developed the Data Encryption Standard. Even otherwise, it dealt a lot with IBM Cryptography and Data Security.

In 1962 he published historical Ephemeridentafeln to the sun, moon and planets from 601 BC to 1649 AD. They found in particular among historians use.

In 1971 he discovered the 24th Mersenne prime. At that time it was the largest known prime number.

As a student at Princeton, he devoted himself with other students ( as John W. Tukey, Richard Feynman ) and the paper folding game Flexagon (and its topological aspects ), the British student Arthur Stone introduced there in 1939. The game was later popularized by Martin Gardner.