Humongous Prime Number Discovered
AP
filed under: Science News
LOS ANGELES (Sept. 27) – Mathematicians at UCLA have discovered a 13-million-digit prime number, a long-sought milestone that makes them eligible for a $100,000 prize.
The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was verified by a different computer system running a different algorithm.
“We’re delighted,” said UCLA’s Edson Smith, the leader of the effort. “Now we’re looking for the next one, despite the odds.”
It’s the eighth Mersenne prime discovered at UCLA.
Primes are numbers like three, seven and 11 that are divisible by only two whole positive numbers: themselves and one.
Mersenne primes — named for their discoverer, 17th century French mathematician Marin Mersenne — are expressed as 2P-1, or two to the power of “P” minus one. P is itself a prime number. For the new prime, P is 43,112,609.
Thousands of people around the world have been participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, a cooperative system in which underused computing power is harnessed to perform the calculations needed to find and verify Mersenne primes.
The $100,000 prize is being offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for finding the first Mersenne prime with more than 10 million digits. The foundation supports individual rights on the Internet and set up the prime number prize to promote cooperative computing using the Web.
The prize could be awarded when the new prime is published, probably next year.
Source: AOL News
Can any human memorize all these numbers?
i knew 630 digits about a year ago– i still remember about 420.
Pi is not a prime number folks.
Nice story though. The new prime can be added to the list of RSA encryption keys.
This story is is a waste of human resources, which could be better spent in medical advancements. I’d jail the prime number time-wasters.
Yes, what is the point? They will never find the largest prime number because it is proven that no such thing exists.
I also doubt that such a large number will be used for encryption.
So what is the point of all this?
What a nonsense to bring news like that on this forum…
It is such a large number that it could have a chess program embedded in it, if you just search for it.
What’s the point of breaking records? Finding the largest prime record is like running the fastest at 100m record- in that the record will always be broken- but would you say the 100m record was pointless? In both the training/algorithms thought up improve for the future so it often has other points to it.