Google Scholar

I went ahead and claimed my Google Scholar page. I trimmed two articles that I didn't actually write. It claims that I have been cited 85 times, including 33 times in the past 5 years. Perhaps most amusing to me is my work being cited in US Patent #7181017. I'm not actually a fan of patenting algorithms, but I'm glad people are reading my work.

My first Math Reviews byline

Last year, I signed up to be a reviewer for Mathematical Reviews. For those of you not familiar with the publication, it is essentially a database of mathematics articles, with short "reviews" written by other mathematicians. These are not reviews in the ordinary sense of a book or movie review -- the reviewer usually doesn't venture an opinion of the work, and even more rarely expresses a negative one. Rather, the review summarizes the results and attempts to put them into context.

Since 1940, Math Reviews has provided an invaluable service for research mathematicians -- having a good summary of an article is important before one begins the arduous task of tracking down a journal article, and the sometimes more arduous task of reading it. This utility has only increased with the electronic form of the database.

My first review appeared this year, and is of the article "On congruence conditions for primality" in the journal Integers. I think you can access the review here if your institution subscribes, but for various uninteresting reasons, I can't confirm that.


Anyway, I'm particularly proud of my five sentences because I have been a Math Reviews reader for about twenty years, and it is nice to join the ranks of the reviewers. Also, I think I get a discount on my next year's AMS membership.

Letter to the Editor

Stan Wagon wrote a letter to the editor in the April 2011 Mathematics Magazine about Perrin's sequence and Perrin pseudoprimes. You may not be able to access it on-line (I can't), but it reads in part:

An important question is: Is an integer prime if and only if it satisfies the Perrin condition, n divides x_n ? This question was raised by R. Perrin in 1899. A counterexample, now known as a Perrin pseudoprime, was not discovered until 1982: the smallest one is 271441. This is quite remarkable compared to, say, Fermat pseudoprimes with base 2, for which 341 is the smallest example. Recent work by J. Grantham [3] shows that there are infinitely many Perrin pseudoprimes.

It's always gratifying to see one's work referenced, and the letter provides some nice context for my research (better than I did in the paper itself!).