The term "backtrack" was coined by American mathematician D. H. Lehmer in the 1950s.
When they could arrange child care, the Lehmers spent weekends staying up all night running such problems, the first over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1945.
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Lehmer's peripatetic career as a number theorist, with he and his wife taking numerous types of work in the United States and abroad to support themselves during the Great Depression, fortuitously brought him into the center of research into early electronic computing.
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From 1945-1946, Lehmer served on the Computations Committee at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, a group established as part of the Ballistics Research Laboratory to prepare the ENIAC for utilization following its completion at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering; the other Computations Committee members were Haskell Curry, Leland Cunningham, and Franz Alt.
Derrick Henry Lehmer (1905-1991), American mathematician and number theorist
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He had over twenty doctoral students at Brown, including Dorothy Lewis Bernstein, Nelson Dunford, George Forsythe and Derrick Lehmer.
In mathematics, the Lehmer–Schur algorithm (named after Derrick Henry Lehmer and Issai Schur) is a root-finding algorithm extending the idea of enclosing roots like in the one-dimensional bisection method to the complex plane.