John Selfridge

John L. Selfridge is an American mathematician who has contributed to the field of analytic number theory. He co-authored 14 papers with Paul Erdős (giving him an Erdős number of 1).

Selfridge received his Ph.D. in 1958 from the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Theodore Motzkin. [ MathGenealogy|id=4827]

In 1962, he proved that 78,557 is a Sierpinski number; he showed that, when "k"=78,557, all numbers of the form "k"2^"n"+1 have a factor in the covering set {3, 5, 7, 13, 19, 37, 73}. Five years after, he and Sierpiński proposed (but could not prove) the conjecture that 78,557 is the smallest Sierpinski number, and thus the answer to the Sierpinski problem. A distributed computing project called Seventeen or Bust is currently trying to proove this statement, at this moment 6 from the original 17 possibilities remain.

Selfridge served on the faculties of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northern Illinois University, chairing the Department of Mathematical Sciences for several years. He was executive editor of Mathematical Reviews from 1978 to 1986, overseeing the computerization of its operations [http://www.ams.org/notices/199703/comm-mr.pdf] . He was a founder of the Number Theory Foundation [http://www.math.uiuc.edu/mathtimes/Fall2007/mathtimes_fall07.htm] , which has named its Selfridge prize in his honour.

ee also

*Sierpinski number
*New Mersenne conjecture
*Erdős–Selfridge's classification of primes

References