H. J. Woodall

In 1925 Lt.-Col. Allan J.C. Cunningham and Woodall gathered together all that was known about the primality and factorization of such numbers and published a small book of tables.[1] "These tables collected from scattered sources the known prime factors for the bases 2 and 10 and also presented the authors' results of thirty years' work with these and the other bases."

Herbert J. Woodall was a British mathematician.

Since 1925 many people have worked on filling in these tables. It is likely that this project is the longest, ongoing computational project in history. Derrick Henry Lehmer, a well known mathematician who died in 1991 was for many years a leader of these efforts. Professor Lehmer was a mathematician who was at the forefront of computing as modern electronic computers became a reality. He was also known as the inventor of some ingenious pre-electronic computing devices specifically designed for factoring numbers. These devices are currently in storage at the Computer Museum in Boston.

A generalized Woodall number is defined to be a number of the form

nbn − 1,

where n + 2 > b; if a prime can be written in this form, it is then called a generalized Woodall prime.

References
  1. Herbert J. Woodall (1911). "Mersenne's Numbers". Nature. 87 (2177): 78. doi:10.1038/087078f0.


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