GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
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Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#2I believe the classic joke goes,
"Now Bruce Schneier needs to change the code on his luggage"
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#3tl;dr The 50th Mersenne prime was just found by a volunteer of the GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) project. It is 2^77,232,917-1 and has 23,249,425 digits. Mersenne primes are extremely rare and are always of the form 2^p-1 for some positive integer p. The first four Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31, and 127.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#4January looks to be a good month for discovering large prime numbers! As a former contributor to the project it would be great to have a primer on the best way to contribute today, covering the options for CPUs vs GPUs and the various projects for factorizations vs primality tests.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#5As someone who knows nothing about advanced mathematics, could someone explain why this matters? (i.e. beyond that this is rare and theoretically interesting)
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#6So that's what it's working on when it's starting up.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#7> Jonathan Pace is a 51-year old Electrical Engineer living in Germantown, Tennessee. Perseverance has finally paid off for Jon - he has been hunting for big primes with GIMPS for over 14 years.
What a great story.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#8As someone who knows nothing about advanced mathematics, could someone explain why this matters? (i.e. beyond that this is rare and theoretically interesting)
The link has another link to a page describing why this matters:
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#9As someone who knows nothing about advanced mathematics, could someone explain why this matters? (i.e. beyond that this is rare and theoretically interesting)
These numbers are for as far as we know irrelevant for mathematics.
Re: GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number
#10Is there actually any use to discovering ever-larger prime numbers?