Hendrik Lenstra
Hendrik Willem Lenstra Jr. (born 16 April 1949 in Zaandam, Netherlands) is a Dutch mathematician who works in computational number theory. He earned his PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1977, with a thesis on Euclidean number fields, and became a professor there in 1978. In 1987 he joined UC Berkeley, and from 1998 he split his time between Berkeley and Leiden, moving to Leiden full time in 2003.
Lenstra comes from a family of mathematicians; his brothers Arjen, Andries, and Jan Karel Lenstra are also mathematicians, and Jan Karel led the Netherlands’ CWI institute. He was the Chairman of the Program Committee for the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010.
His research is in computational number theory. He is well known for several major contributions, including the Lenstra elliptic-curve factorization method, the Lenstra–Lenstra–Lovász lattice basis reduction algorithm (LLL), the Lenstra–Pomerance–Wagstaff primality conjecture, and the APR-CL primality test.
Lenstra was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984. He won the Fulkerson Prize in 1985, received the Spinoza Prize, was knighted as a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion in 2009, gave a Gauss Lecture in 2009, and became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 12:08 (CET).