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47th Mersenne Prime Confirmed

Posted by kdawson on from the that's-odd dept.

radiot88 writes to let us know that he heard a confirmation of the discovery of the 47th known Mersenne Prime on NPR's Science Friday (audio here). The new prime, 2^42,643,801 - 1, is actually smaller than the one discovered previously. It was "found by Odd Magnar Strindmo from Melhus, Norway. This prime is the second largest known prime number, a 'mere' 141,125 digits smaller than the Mersenne prime found last August. Odd is an IT professional whose computers have been working with GIMPS since 1996 testing over 1,400 candidates. This calculation took 29 days on a 3.0 GHz Intel Core2 processor. The prime was independently verified June 12th by Tony Reix of Bull SAS in Grenoble, France..."

6 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cool processor by Nutria · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Do they realize that they can put eight quad-core xeons in a machine and finish the calculation in a single shift instead of waiting a month?

    What makes you think they aren't?

    And what makes you think this man would pony up the serious coin for such a beast just to find a prime number?

    --
    "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
  2. The joys of untested code by tqft · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The admins missed the prime for about a month
    http://mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=11996
    Apparently the email that was supposed to be sent wasn't when the prime was reported

    --
    The Singularity is closer than you think
    Quant
  3. "telescope" from Intel by moon3 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Discovering a prime number that distant from the zero is like discovering a Pluto like planet in outer space. But instead of Hubble telescope you need a powerful mathematical one..

  4. Re:Can we have the value? by spandex_panda · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This gives you the number, keep hitting 'More digits'. Unfortunately it gives it as an image so I can't copy paste here.

    --
    like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
  5. Re:Odd's prime by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Hah, excellent. :)

    (For the non-locals, Even is a perfectly common Norwegian name.)

  6. Re:Hmm by Bart+Coppens · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually, you can apparently use larger Mersenne Primes to improve results in totally different but very useful fields, like privacy-related schemes. For example, this paper http://eccc.hpi-web.de/eccc-reports/2006/TR06-127/index.html uses large Mersenne primes to get interesting results on Locally Decodable Codes and Private Information Retrieval Schemes...