Donald Dines Wall

Who was Donald Dines Wall?

Donald Dines Wall was a mathematician working primarily on number theory. He obtained his Ph.D. on normal numbers from University of California, Berkeley in 1949, where his adviser was Derrick Henry Lehmer. His better known papers include the first modern analysis of Fibonacci sequence modulo a positive integer.

Drawing on Wall's work, Zhi-Hong Sun and his twin brother Zhi-Wei Sun proved a theorem about what are now known as the Wall-Sun-Sun primes that guided the search for counterexamples to Fermat's last theorem.