Ariel Glenn
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Ariel T. Glenn (née Laura A. Nickel) with Landon Curt Noll discovered on October 30, 1978 that 221701 − 1 was the 25th Mersenne prime. This made international news because Noll and Nickel were still high school students. They claimed inspiration from a biography about Chen Jingrun that they had read as 15 year-olds. For the verification of this number alone, the pair used almost eight hours of time on a CDC Cyber 174 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory after consuming over 400 hours of computer time in their search using a custom implementation of the Lucas-Lehmer test.
Ariel worked as a public key infrastructure specialist at Columbia University, and is now a member of the Midnight Special Law Collective, a radical law collective.
