Carl Bernard Pomerance (born in 1944 in Joplin, Missouri) is an American number theorist. He attended college at Brown University and later received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972 with a dissertation proving that any odd perfect number has at least 7 distinct prime factors. He immediately joined the faculty at the University of Georgia, becoming full professor in 1982. He subsequently worked at Lucent Technologies for a number of years, and then became a distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College

Quotes

• Maybe so, but something is going on with the primes.
  • In response to Albert Einstein's (1943) quote "God doesn't play dice [with the universe]." From a 1997 lecture by Carl Pomerance on the Erdos-Kac theorem.
  • Due to a newspaper misprint, this quote is often misattributed to Paul Erdős.

• You can ask the question about these ancient topics, such as perfect numbers and amicable numbers... and ask, are these good problems... I'd like to give a small amount of evidence... that they are... [S]tudying them helped us develop all of elementary number theory and from elementary number theory we developed the rest of number theory, and also you can argue that from elementary number theory came algebra..
  • "Paul Erdős and the Rise of Statistical Thinking in Elementary Number Theory" (July, 2013) Erdős Centennial Conference, Budapest.

External links