47th Mersenne Prime Confirmed

Posted by kdawson on Saturday June 13, 2009 @10:54AM 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..."

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The joys of untested code by tqft · 2009-06-13 11:24 · 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

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