SB Project Announces 4th-Largest Known Prime

alien88 writes "The Seventeen or Bust project announced today that they have discovered the fourth largest prime on record. The prime is 1,521,561 digits long and is their sixth discovery since the start of the project. They now have 11 multipliers left to prove that k = 78,557 is the smallest Sierpinski number. Randy Sundquist of Team ExtremeDC's computer discovered the number on December 6th."

Comments

Re:you just knew it

[KDan]

Let's patent it right now !!!

Daniel

Re:Proof

[sasami]

Not trying to be sarcastic, but I have seen tons of "math theorems" and I guess I am not geeky enough to understand the point.

There's no need to have a point because the assumption is that someone will eventually find a use for it. In mathematics, physics, and all sorts of other disciplines, you don't look at your discovery and say "This would be great for X!" You publish it, forget about it, and then someone else years later has a problem to solve and does a literature search.

In the mid-1800s some poor sod went and developed a whole branch of mathematics called tensor calculus. It was an absolute mess and no one used it for anything.

Until fifty years later, Einstein is having trouble formalizing relativity and talks to his mathematician friend, who replies, "Oh, you know, I think I heard of something once..."

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Dum de dum.