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 a high school students. They claimed inspriation 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 cosuming over 400 hours of computer time in their search using a custom implementation of the Lucas-Lehmer test. She is currently a public key infrastructure specialist at Columbia University.

External links

• Ariel's home page at Columbia