Landon Curt Noll

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Landon Curt Noll bigraphy, stories - American mathematician

Landon Curt Noll : biography

October 28, 1960 –

Landon Curt Noll (born October 28, 1960) is an American computer scientist, co-discoverer of the 25th Mersenne prime and discoverer of the 26th,Noll C, Nickel L: The 25th and 26th Mersenne Primes, Mathematics of Computation 35: 1387-1390 which he found while still enrolled at Hayward High School and concurrently at California State University, Hayward. He was also a member of the Amdahl Six team which discovered another record prime in 1989; this prime remains unusual as a record large prime as it was not a Mersenne prime.

Noll was born in Walnut Creek, California, United States. At age 18, he became the youngest person to break the record for the largest known prime. He has held or co-held the record three times. He is also the co-inventor (with John Horton Conway) of a system for naming arbitrarily large powers of 10. He also helped start the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, and is a co-inventor of the Fowler Noll Vo hash function.

Noll is an avid astronomer.. He was also involved in politics as a Sunnyvale, California city council member and vice-mayor.

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