Bryant Tuckerman

Louis Bryant Tuckerman, III (November 28, 1915 – May 19, 2002) was an American mathematician born in Lincoln, Nebraska. He was a member of the team that developed the Data Encryption Standard (DES).

He studied topology at Princeton, where he invented the Tuckerman traverse method for revealing all the faces of a flexagon.

On March 4, 1971, he discovered the 24th Mersenne prime, a titanic prime, with a value of


 * $$2^{19937}-1$$.