New Largest Prime Found: Over 7 Million Digits

Jeff Gilchrist writes "On May 15, 2004, Josh Findley discovered the 41st known Mersenne Prime, 2 to the 24,036,583th power minus 1. The number is nearly a million digits larger than our last find and is now the largest known prime number! Josh's calculation took just over two weeks on his 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 computer. The new prime was verified by Tony Reix in just 5 days using only half the power of a Bull NovaScale 5000 HPC running Linux on 16 Itanium II 1.3 GHz CPUs. A second verification was completed by Jeff Gilchrist of Elytra Enterprises Inc. in Ottawa, Canada using eleven days of time on a HP rx5670 quad Itanium II 1.5 GHz CPU server at SHARCNET. Both verifications used Guillermo Ballester Valor's Glucas program." Read on for more on the discovery, including how you can help find more primes.

Gilchrist continues "If you want to see the number in written in decimal, Perfectly Scientific, Dr. Crandall's company which developed the FFT algorithm used by GIMPS, makes a poster you can order containing the entire number. It is kind of pricey because accurately printing an over-sized poster in 1-point font is not easy! Makes a cool present for the serious math nut in your family.

For more information, the press release is available.

Congratulations to Josh and every GIMPS contributor for their part in this remarkable find. You can download the client for your chance at finding the next world record prime! A forum for newcomers is available to answer any questions you may have.

GIMPS is closing in on the $100,000 Electronic Frontier Foundation award for the first 10-million-digit prime. The new prime is 72% of the size needed, however an award-winning prime could be mere weeks or as much as few years away - that's the fun of math discoveries, said GIMPS founder George Woltman. The GIMPS participant who discovers the prime will receive $50,000. Charity will get $25,000. The rest will be used primarily to fund more prime discoveries. In May 2000, a previous participant won the foundation's $50,000 award for discovering the first million-digit prime."

Comments

harrumph

[maxbang]

Say all you will, but Optimus is still the ultimate prime.

Re:I hate to be a pushover...

[irokitt]

This is of course an attempt to impress chicks.

Hey baby, did you know I discovered the longest prime number?

Notice I said it's an attempt, I didn't say it would work;)

Hey, this is very important.......

[Lexomatic]

Who knows, one day you might find yourself struck in the tiger den with multiple doors all marked with Mersenne Primes, and a sign saying, "safe exit thru the door marked with the 41st Mersenne Prime". Yeah, then who is gonna bitch about not memorizing that sucker, huh?

I knew it

[jmoen]

Size does matter :)

Here is the whole number!

[fredrikj]

In binary: 11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 11111111111111111111111111111111111111...

Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.

Sorry :/

fermat was here

[werdnapk]

I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of a 10 million digit prime which this margin is too narrow to contain.

Re:I hate to be a pushover...

[shigelojoe]

Which is why I'd hate to be a math student in the 22nd century:

Teacher: Ok class, your homework for tomorrow is to find a Mersenne prime longer than 1,000,000 digits. *By hand*. I don't want to see any computer printouts.

Class: *Groan*

Re:I hate to be a pushover...

[Paradise Pete]

I have pi tattooed on my dick. It usually says 3.14, but man when it gets angry, it goes all the way to 3.141!

Wait, I didn't tell that right.