M₁₀₇: Fauquembergue or Powers?

By Chris Caldwell

R. E. Powers announced that he had found M₁₀₇ = 2¹⁰⁷-1 to be prime and almost immediately E. Fauquembergue announced he also had discovered this fact.  Because of this some texts credit one of these, other texts credit the other.  Here we choose Powers for a variety of reasons, especially the number of false and errant claims made by Fauquembergue.  For example, Robinson writes [Robinson54]:

The result of Powers for n=241 was found to be correct; the remainders from his earlier computations, for n=103, 109, had not been published, and were not available for checking.  On the other hand, the four remainders of Fauquembergue, for n=101, 103, 109, 137 were all found to be incorrect, as was the remainder of Barker for n=167.

(Note that Robinson's complete article is available on the web.