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chalsall (Slashdot reader #185), writes: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered the largest known prime number, 2^82,589,933-1, having 24,862,048 digits. A computer volunteered by Patrick Laroche from Ocala, Florida made the find on December 7, 2018.

GIMPS has been on amazing lucky streak, finding triple the expected number of new Mersenne primes -- a dozen in the last fifteen years.
"This anomaly is not necessarily evidence that existing theories on the distribution of Mersenne primes is incorrect," notes GIMPS. "However, if the trend continues it may be worth further investigation. " They also report that the newly-discovered prime number "is more than one and a half million digits larger than the previous record prime number" -- and it's one of just 51 known Mersenne prime numbers ever discovered. "GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered the last 17..."

Patrick Laroche is one of thousands of volunteers using GIMPS' free software to hunt for prime numbers -- and is now eligible for a $3,000 "research discovery award," the group writes at mersenne.org. "GIMPS' next major goal is to win the $150,000 award administered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation offered for finding a 100 million digit prime number" -- of which $50,000 will be awarded to the discoverer, with another $50,000 going to a 501(c)(3) mathematics-related charity selected by GIMPS, and $50,000 retained by GIMPS to cover expenses and fund other awards.

peetm writes: I have an above averagely bright nephew, aged 10, who's into maths and whose birthday is coming up soon. I'd like to get him a suitable present – most likely one that's mathematically centred. At Christmas we sat together while I helped him build a few very simple Python programs that 'animated' some simple but interesting maths, e.g., we built a factorial function, investigated the Collatz conjecture (3n + 1 problem) and talked about, but didn't implement Eratosthenes' Sieve – one step too far for him at the moment perhaps. I've looked about for books that might blend computing + maths, but haven't really found anything appropriate for a 10-year-old. I should be indebted to anyone who might suggest either a suitable maths book, or one that brings in some facet of computing. Or, if not a book, then some other present that might pique his interest.

Dave Knott writes: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered a new largest known prime number, 2^74,207,281-1, having 22,338,618 digits. The same GIMPS software recently uncovered a flaw in Intel's latest Skylake CPUs, and its global network of CPUs peaking at 450 trillion calculations per second remains the longest continuously-running "grassroots supercomputing" project in Internet history. The prime is almost 5 million digits larger than the previous record prime number, in a special class of extremely rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes. It is only the 49th known Mersenne prime ever discovered, each increasingly difficult to find.

An anonymous reader writes "Here's an interesting article about a robotics experiments designed to test the benefits of coupling visual information to physical movement. This approach, known as embodied cognition, supposes that biological intelligence emerges through interactions between organisms and their environment. Olaf Sporns from Indiana University and Max Lungarella from Tokyo University believe strengthening this connection in robots could make them smarter and more intuitive."

An anonymous reader writes, "The GIMPS project has found a new record prime. 2 ^ 32,582,657 - 1, clocking in at over 9 million digits, is a Mersenne prime, as were the last few record primes. Here is the 9-megabyte decimal expansion."

Jeff Moriarty writes "Some physicists believe they might have caught a whiff of a pattern in the sequence of prime numbers. This would have a huge impact across mathematics, and to people who just really like primes... or like being Prime."

Theodore Logan writes "Has the Riemann Hypothesis finally been proved? The proof is a couple of months old, and to the best of my knowledge a Swedish newspaper is the only one to take up the story yet, so there is certainly a possibility that this is a hoax, or a less than watertight proof. But if it turns out to be the real thing, it will, apart from winning the authors eternal fame and glory for finding the holy Grail of modern math, provide them with a cool $1 million as they claim the first Millennium Prize." We had a story a while back about this as well.

Craigj0 writes "In just 8 days Seventeen or bust has removed three Sierpinski candidates after people have been trying for years. Seventeen or bust is a distributed attack on the Sierpinski problem. You can find the first two press releases here(1) and here(2), the third is still to come. More information about Sierpinski numbers can be found here. Finally they could always use some more people so join!"

Slashback brings you tonight updates and amplifications on the Treo portable drive, recent Higgs Boson findings, finding LDP documentation authors, and more. Author! Author! (Uhh ... author?) Providing a timely update to the Debian / LDP licensing snafu unmadindu writes: "The LDP requests people (even if they are not LDP authors)who are reading this message to forward it to their respective LUG mailing lists. Maybe some of the 'unreachable authors' are still in those LUG lists."

Yup. Sure looks prime to me, yessir. Cesaro writes: "BBC is reporting that the largest prime number yet found has been verified. This number is 4,053,946 digits and took them almost 2 years to find on the GIMPS distributed system. More information can be had here"

This punishment may have to be let out for certain crimes. A semi-anonymous reader wrote to point out that implications of the recent Windows virus Goner may have broader implications than were previously clear. "With word that the new 'Goner' email virus was quickly spreading across the globe, 41 U.S. states and six European countries today announced that anyone caught creating or purposefully distributing a computer virus will be prosecuted under hate crime statutes for intentionally targeting 'people of stupidity.'

The trouble with sounding too good to be true ... Greg Titus writes "As a followup to yesterday's story about the Treo MP3 player (touted as iPod competition) ... Check out the Treo web site this morning (http://www.treoplayer.com/): 'Due to issues beyond Hy-Tek Manufacturing and e.Digital Corporation's control, Hy-Tek has discontinued production of the current Treo design.'"

Getting at the guts of a Linn. thegadgetman, in a fit of "blatant bit of self-promotion" with some more information about the technology that runs the recently-featured (and incredible looking) Linn KiVOR.

"The Linn KiVOR is the first of an ever increasing number of companies adopting our XiVA software for powering the next-generation of media appliances. Built from the start to run on Linux (now running 2.4 series kernel) XiVA blends hard disk technology, advanced software design and embedded Internet technology to provide amazing features.

As well as OEMing our technology, we have our own range of hard-disk audio products - our SoundServers. The M1000 is a range that goes up to 16 outputs and 3 hard-disk, and our S1000 range includes intuitive TV interface and a range up to 3 outputs. All the current products feature professional quality audio cards from Midiman. All these feature the XiVA-Link protocol which has been adopted by many of the major Home Automation controllers (AMX, Crestron etc), and is used by our XiVA-Producer PC application for meta-data editing and MP3 transfer. We also have software for automatic generation of Pronto CCF files, and an application that turns a Visor (with IR booster) into a graphical remote control that contains a listing of all the albums on the server.

Our recently launched XiVA-Net portal is the exciting new Internet based entertainment service from Imerge! It is dedicated to delivering entertainment to the new wave of internet-connected AV products. It will enable you to find out more about the music and artists you love as well as thousands you have not yet had the chance to listen to. XiVA-Net will allow you to buy music, book concert tickets and get the latest music news and gossip from the comfort of your living room. see our web-sites (http://www.imerge.co.uk http://xiva-net.com and http://www.xiva.com) for full details"

Are there no sections? Can they not delve? Since many people have submitted this story, please note that an interesting story on the Higgs Boson, or, perhaps better said, on the lack of Higgs Boson ran in the science section, and is worth checking out.

A reader writes "Distributed computing seems once more to be succesful. The combined effort of many pc's joining Primenet in search for a new Mersenne prime may have found there fifth result. Among them many belonging to /. readers. There is an unconfirmed claim for Mersenne prime #39 of over 3,500,000 digits, for which a considerable amount of money has been awarded. SETI looks for ET's messages, but found none sofar. Mersenne primes are used to tell ET about us. A previous found Mersenne number was used to show the advance of science on our planet in a message send into outer space. " The Primenet list has confirmed that while they still need to totally test it out (which should be done by the 24th), they believe that the number found today is the 39th positive.

Bob9113 writes: "A person named Phil Carmody has found a very interesting prime number. When converted to hexadecimal, the result is a gzip that contains a DeCSS implementation. I've posted a short bit of Java here that takes the prime as a command line parameter and dumps the result to standard out if you want to test it." Very clever, I just wish the background on that page wasn't headache inducing.