Harvey Dubner

Harvey Dubner (1928-2019) was an engineer and mathematician who lived in New Jersey, noted for his contributions to finding large prime numbers. In 1984, he and his son Robert collaborated in developing the 'Dubner cruncher', a board which used a commercial finite impulse response filter chip to speed up dramatically the multiplication of medium-sized multi-precision numbers, to levels competitive with supercomputers of the time, though his focus later changed to efficient implementation of FFT-based algorithms on personal computers.

He found many large prime numbers of special forms: repunits, prime Fibonacci and Lucas numbers, twin primes, Sophie Germain primes, Belphegor's prime, and primes in arithmetic progression.[1] In 1993 he was responsible for more than half the known primes of more than two thousand digits.

Dubner was also the first to publish a paper on the first blackjack point count (The High Low Count) which is used by most blackjack card counters today. This was presented at the Fall Joint Computer Conference held in Las Vegas in 1963 at a panel titled "Using Computers in Games of Chance and Skill".

He also authored Dubner's conjecture.

Harvey died on October 23, 2019[2]