Harry Vandiver

Harry Schultz Vandiver (October 21, 1882 – January 9, 1973) was an American mathematician, known for work in number theory.

He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to John Lyon and Ida Frances (Everett) Vandiver.

He did not complete a formal education, choosing instead to leave school at an early age to work for his father's firm, although he did attend some graduate classes at the University of Pennsylvania in 1904–5.

Vandiver won the Frank Nelson Cole Prize of the American Mathematical Society for his paper on Fermat's Last Theorem in 1931.

[1] A question he frequently asked about the ideal class group of cyclotomic fields, and now known as Kummer–Vandiver conjecture, was first posed in an 1849 letter from Ernst Kummer to Leopold Kronecker.