François Proth (22 March 1852 – 21 January 1879) was a French self-taught mathematician farmer who lived in Vaux-devant-Damloup near Verdun, France.
[2] The most famous of these, Proth's theorem, can be used to test whether a Proth number (a number of the form k2n + 1 with k odd and k < 2n) is prime.
The numbers passing this test are called Proth primes; they continue to be of importance in the computational search for large prime numbers.
[3] Proth also formulated Gilbreath's conjecture on successive differences of primes, 80 years prior to Gilbreath, but his proof of the conjecture turned out to be erroneous.
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