Édouard Lucas

…in the outstanding contributions of Édouard Lucas, C.L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), and others at the turn of the century. Lucas’ four-volume Récréations mathématiques (1882–94) became a classic. The mathematical recreations of Dodgson included Symbolic Logic and The Game of Logic; Pillow Problems and A Tangled Tale, 2 vol. (1885–95).

In 1876 the French mathematician Édouard Lucas found a way to test the primality of Mersenne numbers. By 1952 the U.S. mathematician Raphael M. Robinson had applied Lucas’ test and, by means of electronic digital computers, had found the Mersenne primes for n = 521; 607; 1,279; 2,203; and 2,281,…

…1883 by the French mathematician Édouard Lucas, though his role in its invention has been disputed. Ever popular, made of wood or plastic, it still can be found in toy shops. It consists essentially of three pegs fastened to a stand and of eight circular disks, each having a hole…

…coined by the French mathematician Édouard Lucas, and scientists began to discover such sequences in nature; for example, in the spirals of sunflower heads, in pine cones, in the regular descent (genealogy) of the male bee, in the related logarithmic (equiangular) spiral in snail shells, in the arrangement of leaf…

…1883 by the French mathematician Édouard Lucas, though his role in its invention has been disputed. Ever popular, made of wood or plastic, the Tower of Hanoi can be found in toy shops around the world.