Helaman Ferguson

Who is Helaman Ferguson?

Helaman Rolfe Pratt Ferguson is an American sculptor and a digital artist, specifically an algorist.

Ferguson's mother died when he was about three and his father went off to serve in the Second World War. He was adopted by an Irish immigrant and raised in New York. He learned to work with his hands in an old-world style with earthen materials from his adoptive father who was a carpenter and stonemason by trade. An art-inclined math teacher in high school helped him develop his dual interests in math and art.

Ferguson was a graduate of Hamilton College, a liberal arts school in New York. In 1971, he received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Washington. Ferguson and his wife, Claire, later moved to Utah, where he continued to teach math and she studied art at Brigham Young University. The couple raised their seven children—counting mathematicians, musicians, a software developer and a potter among them—while Ferguson was tenured at BYU for 17 years.

In 1977, Ferguson and another mathematician, Rodney Forcade, developed an algorithm for integer relation detection. It was first viable generalization of the Euclidean algorithm to three or more variables.