Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

12M Digit Prime Number Sets Record, Nets $100,000

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the that's-a-lotta-bits dept.

coondoggie writes "A 12-million-digit prime number, the largest such number ever discovered, has landed a voluntary math research group a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The number, known as a Mersenne prime, is the 45th known Mersenne prime, written shorthand as 2 to the power of 43,112,609, minus 1 . A Mersenne number is a positive integer that is one less than a power of two, the group stated. The computing project called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) made the discovery on a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Mathematics Department."

1 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Re:so? by FlyingBishop · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    What can you do with plutonium? I mean, I've heard, oh it's useful in nuclear bombs, but never WHY it's useful in nuclear bombs.

    You haven't heard why because you're not a fucking cryptoanalyst.

    Now, if you really want a primer on primes and cryptography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA is a good place to start. But anyone with a CS degree at least should understand the basics of why big primes make good private keys