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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."

3 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. 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.

  3. 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.