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New Largest Prime Found: Over 7 Million Digits
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 $50,000 award for discovering the first million-digit prime."
The GIMPS Project found this prime. You too can contribute by downloading the client (for various OSes).
Thought I would drive the point home as this is a great DC project that doesn't receive half the attention of some of the more dubious DC projects...
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So right now, this is the largest proven prime number at this point in time. It is 1,000,000 digits larger than the next largest known prime number, (which is also a mersenne prime).
There very well may be a day where primes this large will be used for encryption purposes. But this may be a long way off.
Keep in mind, that so much of the underpinnings of today is based on mathematics from the 1600's to the early 1900's. The math we pursue today will most likely reach a practical application point next century.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Primality tests for numbers of the form k*b^n+/-1 have always (since Proth's time) been poly time, in fact O(n^(2+eps)).
http://primepages.org/
'proving'
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
Been running prime 95 for 6 years now.
.. ive found no primes but the work ive done would have taken 307 years for a p90 computer to match... a p90 being the 'zero-point' computer when the project started.
Started with a p120 laptop, at times had a dozen computers teamed up.
In that time
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
"Are Mersennes really the easiest numbers to prove prime?"
Yes, because of the Lucas Lehmer primality test, which you can google if you want to see the details.
The standard proof of primality involves factoring the number one less than or one greater than the prime. Obviously, the number one greater than 2^p-1 is easily factored, which is the basis of the test.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
I am not sure about any use for perfect numbers, but the Mersenne primes themselves can be used to create random number generators with extremely long periods. That takes some additional work, although not as much work as finding this prime among tens of thousands of composite candidates.