Slashdot Mirror
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."
Can anyone post those digits in case the site gets /.'ed?
Those math freaks sure are a bunch of GIMPS.
No Way!!
2^25,964,951 - 1.
Is my password! Oh Man, I guess everyone knows it now....
Now we can use the 41st and 42nd for a 50 megabit RSA key.
This is the 42nd one? I wonder if that means anything...
Behold, another webcomic!
GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search
They have Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and OS/2 clients.
This one contains all the information to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything!
Berto
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?
It is confirmed that it is a prime, but it hasn't yet been confirmed that it is the 42nd largest prime, because some numbers have not been checked.
From TFA:
However, note that the region between the 39th and 40th known Mersenne primes has not been completely searched, so it is not known if M20,996,011 is actually the 40th Mersenne prime.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
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.
GIMPS is the name of the project that apparently was responsible for finding this, so the parent was a joke, not flame bait.
The top three previously known primes were Mersenne. Here's a list. At the time they were discovered, almost all largest Mersenne primes have held the record for biggest prime until being edged out by another Mersenne prime. I am not sure when a non-Mersenne last had that status, but it is a rare occurrence.
.."
Looking for Mersennes is "picking the low fruit" when it comes to prime hunting so I question the phrasing "Not only is it the biggest Mersenne
What would have been remarkable would have been if the new largest prime were *not* a Mersenne.
yes. There is a theorem due to Euclid that every even perfect number (a number which is the product of all of its divisors except itself) is of the form
(2^n-1)*2^n. The given form does not apply to odd perfect numbers, but it is unknown whether any odd perfect numbers exist.
E = m c^3 Don't drink and derive E = m c^3
So??
Bill G.
I found it by leaving my browser open for a while on this page.
Here is a torrent of the prime number.. it's 25MB..
:)
M42.torrent
Some good times testing bandwidth
You mean a number which is the *sum* of all of its divisors except itself.
A number which is the product of all its divisors except itself is, well, any product of exactly two primes.
that the digits make a phone number?? 225-964-9511 used to dial the residence of a man in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Now all you get is "the number you have dialed is not a working number"
Could this be the first telephone slashdotting in history!?
That is not true. The number p1*p2*....*pn+1 is either a prime, OR it has a factor that is not one of the p's. In either case, you have a new prime, which as an aside proves that there are infinitely many primes.
E = m c^3 Don't drink and derive E = m c^3
is the Mersenne Twister (MT), a pseudorandom number generator.
Pseudorandom number generators are periodic, that is they start repeating the sequence of "random" numbers, after a while. This is bad. The period of the MT is as big as the Mersenne Prime that you choose to base the algorithm on. So, if you wanted a REALLY long period, you could use this new prime. In practice, however, very few people need this long of a period.
You know, with an attitude like yours, you really missed your calling as a nerd battle rapper.
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...
Wikileaks, no DNS