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42nd Mersenne Prime Confirmed
Jazzer_Techie writes "The possible Mersenne Prime discovered last week has now been confirmed. This prime has 7,816,230 digits, which makes it not only the largest Mersenne Prime, but also the largest prime of any kind ever discovered. For those who don't want to take time to read the article, the prime is 2^25,964,951 - 1."
how many hours did it take to verify?
I'm not trying to be a troll here, but of what possible value is a really big prime number? Is there any practical value to it, or is it just an interesting bit of trivia?
The FAQ for this endeavor can be seen here.
One glaring ommission from the FAQ is "Why participate in this?" I guess if you have to ask why, there's no point in asking.
I'm a big tall mofo.
So does this make (2^25,964,951 - 1) * (2^25,964,950) the largest known perfect number?
Looking at the binary representation, I conclude: Life, the universe and everything are all one, just repeated many times.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's certainly the 42nd Mersenne number which has been found to be prime (i,e, if sorting the Mersenne primes for the date when they have been found to be prime, then this one is at position 42). Note that future discoveries won't change that (except if any "known" Mersenne primes turn out not to be prime, i.e. if there was an error in the testing), the next Mersenne prime to be identified will be the 43rd, even if it's smaller.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Ok, now that we've finally found prime numbers so ridiculously large as to never have any practical purpose within any of our lifetimes, can we stop running the GIMPS screen saver, and move over all that computational power to something that might actually help mankind (within our lifetimes, even)?
e ensaver
No, not SETI@home (which is about as useful as GIMPS), can't folks please switch to something like the UD/NFCR "Screensaver Lifesaver" that processes some various highly computationally intensive biological problems (ligand fitting, etc.) related to a number of issues (these are directed at cancer research, specifically):
- http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer.html
- http://www2.nfcr.org/site/PageServer?pagename=scr
- http://www.grid.org/download/gold/download.htm
I don't know, maybe it's just me, but when I hear of all the people running GIMPS, SETI@home, etc. etc., I feel a tiny bit sad that maybe all those unused cycles could be used towards something more useful, but not as sexy...
2^25,964,951 to 1 against also happens to be the finite amount of improbability needed to generate the infinite improbability drive out of thin air.
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek