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

Persuit of uselessness != profit

[evilandi]

Eidechse: Binary math was once thought to be a useless curiousity.

Worshipping the sun was also once thought to be useless- and still is. Your point?

Primes have many uses. Most importantly, from the average Slashdot reader's point of view, they are the basis for most modern cryptography, such as the yellow padlocks on web browsers used to encrypt credit card details when buying online. Prime numbers are not a useless curiosity, they are highly valuable and very deliberately saught after.

Extending your logic, if we fill our lives with activities that today we consider useless, then we will eventually benefit from that. That manages to fulfil both the Underpant Gnomes and Cargo Cult paradigms of badness in one go.

People who spend their days doing useless stuff in the hope of turning up trumps are invariably disappointed. Christopher Columbus did not discover America for the Europeans as a random act; he was deliberately looking for a quick route to India. Alexander Fleming was not just messing about in the lab when he discovered penecillin; he was conducting very purposeful research into stapholycocci. These discoveries, toted by the lottery-culture media as accidents of pure chance, were in fact made only as part of rigourous effort and deliberation. Sure, they were side-effects, but there had to be a main effect that these people were searching for in order for there to be something for there to be a side-effect of. Equally, with your example of binary maths, these people were conducting very purposeful research into pure mathematics.

Mind you, since it is a national holiday here in the UK today, I'm going to test your theory by spending all day watching old Tom & Jerry cartoons. Just in case.