Carl Pomerance (born in 1944 in Joplin, Missouri) is a well known number theorist. He attened college at Brown University and later received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972 with a dissertation proving that any odd perfect number N has at least 7 distinct prime factors. He immediately joined the faculty at the University of Georgia, becoming full professor in 1982. He subsequently worked at Lucent Technologies for a number of years, and then became a Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College.