Talk:D. H. Lehmer

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Dotagy[edit]

Though I find it a delightful coinage, the word "dotagy" is not to be found in the entire corpus of the Oxford English Dictionary. What, though, is a good word for a man who remained productive long into his old age? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.114.59.88 (talk) 19:51, 26 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Untitled[edit]

This person is also referred to regarding a Linear_congruential_generator (Pseudorandom number generator) which he apparently made in 1948. For instance, Microsoft Windows has a function that uses this, documented here: RtlUniform documentation.

Why is this information not in the article? I was going to add it, but noticed it here. --69.37.181.70 00:26, 7 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No response after three weeks; I'm adding this information to the page. 66.159.149.120 22:58, 30 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Lehmer's phenomenon/Lehmer pairs[edit]

One of the most important discoveries of Lehmer's was the existence of pairs of zeros of the Riemann zeta function on the critical line which are extremely closely spaced. (From memory, the smallest such pair has imaginary parts slightly greater then 7005, and the next between 17100 and 17200.) Similar pairs occur for various Dirichlet (and other) L-functions. I thought that, since the existence of, and the properties of other zeros around these pairs, offers a significantly important way of approaching the Riemann hypothesis (in particular, calculating lower bounds for the de Bruijn-Newman constant - and related work allows them to be defined precisely), they deserve a mention?

Hair Commodore 21:59, 3 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Congruence Machines[edit]

There really should be some discussion of Lehmer's machines for solving simultaneous linear congruences by mechanizing Gauss's "method of exclusion", either here or on a separate page. His early electromechanical machines are important precursors of digital computers, and his '60s-vintage electronic machines still outperformed the fastest computers of their day on these problems.

For that matter, I can find no discussion at all on Wikipedia of Gauss's method of exclusion, and coverage of sieving in general (especially from a practical standpoint) is really spotty. Tom Duff 17:12, 7 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

D.N. Lehmer and combinatorial computing?[edit]

I found the paragraph on the father D.N. Lehmer in the Combintorics section very likely wrong. His father died before the advent of electronic computing; while I can see he was involved in mechanical implementations of sieve methods in number theory, it seems unlikely that anything that could be called "combinatorial computing" existed in those days. I've tagged the claim [citation needed]. I removed a sentence about the factorial number system, since that was certainly known well before. Also it would seem curious to mention things here about the father that are not mentioned in the article about him. Marc van Leeuwen (talk) 14:27, 21 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

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book[edit]

The article says "D. H. Lehmer wrote the article "Machine tools of Computation," which is chapter one in the book "Applied Combinatorial Mathematics," by Edwin Beckenbach, 1964. It describes methods for producing permutations, combinations etc. This was a uniquely valuable resource and has only been rivaled recently by Volume 4 of Donald Knuth's series." What aouut Combinatorial Algorithms by Wilf? That is what I used. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 20:26, 24 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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