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Largest Twin Prime Yet Discovered

Posted by kdawson on from the Hardy-Littlewood-conjecture dept.

Chris Chiasson writes "The Twin Internet Prime Search and PrimeGrid have recently discovered the largest known twin prime. A twin prime is a pair of prime numbers separated by the integer two. The pair discovered on January 15th was 2003663613 * 2195,000 ± 1. The two primes are 58,711 digits long. The discoverer was Eric Vautier, from France."

5 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. How is this meaningful? by JimMcc · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Seriously. I'm not a math major, etc. But I'm curious, is this of value? Other than of course as a curiosity.

  2. Fun stuff by A+beautiful+mind · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Some people are very good at finding these primes. The now disposed record twin prime's finder was prof. Járai, whose lectures I attended.

    I find it interesting that the guy who works with insanely cool things like primes gave mind-numblingly boring lectures. He basically read his book out aloud. Some people are just very good at research and very bad at teaching.

    --
    It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
    Be yourself no matter what they say
  3. Re:Huh? What? by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Actually, a twin prime is a pair of numbers n + 1 and n - 1 such that both are prime. For example, 41 and 43 are twin primes. Incidentally, if n is greater than 4, then n is always a multiple of 6; this is fairly easy to prove to yourself.

  4. Minor correction by Zadaz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "The discoverer was a computer in France, owned by Eric Vautier."

    I never felt like I should be allowed to take credit for what my screen saver does. Espcially since the whole point is that it does it when I'm not doing anything.

    'Course this will all be sorted out when computers can vote.

  5. power consumtions by AndyST · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It occurs to me that the power consumed for this kind of calculations is quite high. Back when I was doing seti@home, the classic one, they explicitly told people not to let computers running for the sole purpose of calculation, even asking them to turn them of when you guys in the US had a power crisis. There are people running farms of computers just for the fun of it. *sigh*

    seti, primes and stuff might be important, but I'd like to still have some power left to radio a reply to E.T.