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12M Digit Prime Number Sets Record, Nets $100,000
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."
isn't there anyone out there doing useful research we could fund with this money?
That's like OVER 9000!!!
Glad to hear they're putting all those donations to use. There's no telling the impact on civil liberties that having access to a really large prime number will have...
It enlarges all our penises you n00b!!
You know what news headline you will NEVER EVER see? "African scientist advances ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC FIELD with a new discovery!"
By the way, if a white guy who was born in South Africa moves to the USA and becomes a citizen... does he call himself an African-American?
so, if we know all the primes between 3 and 43million, about 3.7 million prime numbers), and we have taken the time to define a category of prime number equal to 2^n-1, that means it took THIS DAMN LONG for someone to calculate a few million computations to come up with this new "milestone"???
It seems to me finding all the mersenne primes would have long since surpassed this mark seeing we defined this category of Euclidean "perfect numbers" back in the 1700s! Granted, the computational power to even determine is a 12M didgit number is in fact prime is fairly substantial, let alone calculating a factor of 2 to that length, but we're finding a new bigger one a few times a year now, with a few million additional didgits each time.
Finding all the primes between this one and 3 is a feat, until you considder the last 9 in a row bigger prime numbers discovered are ALL mersenne primes. If we simply focussed on running the existing primes through 2^n-1, we'd find every prine through a few billion didgits in a couple of years. And honestly, what have we learned by this new data since 2000? has it actually provided some pattern we didn't already know, or unlocked some secret about methematics we didn't know? Nope, it's just about who has the bigger CPU budget.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.