Ariel Glenn

Ariel T. Glenn (née Laura A. Nickel) with Landon Curt Noll discovered on October 30 1978 that 2²¹⁷⁰¹ − 1 was the 25th Mersenne prime. This made international news because Noll and Nickel were still high school students. They claimed inspiration from a biography about Chen Jingrun that they had read as 15 year-olds. For the verification of this number alone, the pair used almost eight hours of time on a CDC Cyber 174 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory after consuming over 400 hours of computer time in their search using a custom implementation of the Lucas-Lehmer test.

Ariel worked as a public key infrastructure specialist at Columbia University, and is now a member of the Midnight Special Law Collective, a radical law collective.

External links

* [http://www.columbia.edu/~ariel/ Ariel's home page at Columbia]
* [http://primes.utm.edu/bios/page.php?id=32 Laura A. Nickel, titan]
* [http://midnightspecial.net Midnight Special Law Collective's website]