Home > Edouard Lucas

Lucas died in unusual circumstances. At the banquet of the annual congress of the Association française pour l'avancement des science a waiter dropped some crockery and a piece of broken plate cut Lucas on the cheek. He died a few days later of a sever skin inflammation probably caused by septicemia.

Lucas is known for his study of the Fibonacci sequence. The related Lucas sequence is named after him. He gave a formula for finding the n^th term of the Fibonacci sequence.

He devised methods for testing the primality of numbers. Later Derrick Henry Lehmer refined his work and obtained the Lucas-Lehmer test for Mersenne numbers.

He worked on the development of the umbral calculus.

Lucas was also interested in recreational mathematics; the Tower of HanoiThe Tower of Hanoi (also called Towers of Hanoi is a mathematical game or puzzle. It consists of three pegs, and a number of discs of different sizes which can slot onto any peg. The puzzle starts with the discs neatly stacked in order of size on one peg, puzzle was invented by him.

1 See also

• Lucas-Lehmer primality testThe Lucas-Lehmer primality test is a method of testing the primality of some number n it requires that the prime factors of n 1 be known. If there exists some a less than n and greater than 1 such that firstly : and then : for all prime factors q of n 1,

2 External links

• MacTutor History of Mathematics archive - Biography of Lucas