D. H. Lehmer, probably
around the time of his graduation from Berkeley, ca. 1927.
2.8 x 3.8 inches
Private collection
He held appointments in various capacities at the California Institute of Technology, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and Lehigh University before joining the Department of Mathematics at Berkeley in 1940. He later served as chair of the Department, as well as vice chair of the Computer Science Department, and retired in 1972.
“An Extended Theory of
Lucas’ Functions,” Ph.D. dissertation
Berkeley: University
of California, 1930
8.5 x 11.0 inches
In a separate paper, Lehmer continued the inquiry begun with his dissertation. Lucas' functions describe sequences that are defined by a linear recurrence of order 2, such as the Fibonacci sequence 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... in which each term is the sum of the previous two, and its companion sequence 2, 1, 3, 4, 7, 11, ... Lehmer's interest in these functions was largely motivated by their importance in primality testing. In his thesis, Lehmer completed and clarified the theory developed by Lucas in several essential respects.
Emma Lehmer during her
Berkeley days, ca. 1928.
5.9 x 4.0 inches
Private collection
Emma Trotskaia Lehmer was born in Samara, Russia in 1906, and at the age of 4 moved with her family to Manchuria where her father worked for a Russian sugar company. She was tutored at home until she was 14 and, blocked from returning to Russia for higher education due to the turmoil of the Russian Revolution, conceived a plan for an American college education.
I was born in a town with the lovely sounding name of Samara on the great Volga river..."
"My Life and Times,"
corrected typescript,
3 l., n.d.
8.5 x 11.0 inches
Private collection
"A Numerical Function
Applied to Cyclotomy."
Reprint from Bulletin
of the American Mathematical
Society, Vol.
36:291-298, 1930.
6.0 x 9.5 inches
While working for her favorite professor D. N. Lehmer, she met his son and they married the year she graduated. While her husband worked on his Ph.D. degree at Brown University, Emma Lehmer earned her Sc.M. degree; both were awarded in 1930.
Her thesis, "A Numerical Function Applied to Cyclotomy," was published in the April 1930 issue of Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.
Although she taught briefly at Berkeley during World War II (under a wartime exception to the nepotism rule that prevented two members of the same family from holding faculty positions), the majority of Emma Lehmer's mathematical career was spent in independent research.
The story is told that, while still undergraduates, they spent hundreds of hours on a computation, each working independently then comparing results to ensure their accuracy. They continued their professional partnership throughout their lives and co-authored 21 mathematical papers.
Autograph letter to D.
N. Lehmer, 2 l.
4 February 1932
8.5 x 11.0 inches
“Stanford Laboratory
Note Book,” autograph manuscript notebook, 120 pp., 1932
10.0 x 7.5 inches
On pages 12 and 13 Lehmer applies a primality test.