Hans Riesel

Who is Hans Riesel?

Hans Ivar Riesel is a Swedish mathematician who discovered the 18th known Mersenne prime in 1957, using the computer BESK: this prime is 2³²¹⁷-1 and consists of 969 digits. He held the record for the largest known prime from 1957 to 1961, when Alexander Hurwitz discovered a larger one. Riesel also discovered the Riesel numbers. After having worked at the Swedish Board for Computing Machinery, he was awarded his Ph.D. from Stockholm University in 1969 for his thesis Contributions to numerical number theory, and in the same year joined the Royal Institute of Technology as a senior lecturer and associate professor.