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Named after Marin Mersenne, the 17th century French monk and mathematician who first discovered them, a prime number of the form 2p–1, obviously the exponent p must be a prime number. To date, only 46 such Mersenne prime numbers have been found, 8 of which were uncovered by UCLA.
A distributed computing project known as GIMPS (The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) was used to discover the 45th and 46th Mersenne prime numbers (243,112,609-1 and 237,156,667-1 respectively). These are huge numbers, with way more digits than the human mind can really grasp the size of. Here's the preview here. You'll need a good magnifying glass to read the tiny, tiny print!
Both primes were first verified by Sun Microsystems, using the Mlucas program by Ernst Mayer of Cupertino California USA. The verifications ran on 8 dual-core SPARC64 VI 2.15Ghz CPUs of a Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 Server and 4 quad-core SPARC64 VII 2.52GHz CPUs of a Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 Server in Menlo Park, CA, USA. The first prime verification took 13 days, the second prime took 5 days.
The discovery is the tenth record prime for the GIMPS project. Some of the press coverage I’ve seen has been wrong, giving credit to UCLA mathematicians, when it was really just a computer that happened to be in UCLA, which was connected to the GIMPS network. GIMPS has thousands of computers from volunteers all over the world working on the problem simultaneously.
Join now and you could find the next record-breaking prime! You could even win some cash.
Finding such a prime will be extremely difficult. A single test will take approximately 3 years on a Core 2 Duo computer. Your chance of success is roughly 1 in 2,000,000.
Every time something like this happens, I’m reminded of the incredible reliance of cryptography on prime numbers. Obviously, numbers this big are not exactly useful, but the process of discovering them could teach us something about primes in general. In any case, it’s an interesting mathematical achievement.
A distributed computing project known as GIMPS (The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) was used to discover the 45th and 46th Mersenne prime numbers (243,112,609-1 and 237,156,667-1 respectively). These are huge numbers, with way more digits than the human mind can really grasp the size of. Here's the preview here. You'll need a good magnifying glass to read the tiny, tiny print!
Both primes were first verified by Sun Microsystems, using the Mlucas program by Ernst Mayer of Cupertino California USA. The verifications ran on 8 dual-core SPARC64 VI 2.15Ghz CPUs of a Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 Server and 4 quad-core SPARC64 VII 2.52GHz CPUs of a Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 Server in Menlo Park, CA, USA. The first prime verification took 13 days, the second prime took 5 days.
The discovery is the tenth record prime for the GIMPS project. Some of the press coverage I’ve seen has been wrong, giving credit to UCLA mathematicians, when it was really just a computer that happened to be in UCLA, which was connected to the GIMPS network. GIMPS has thousands of computers from volunteers all over the world working on the problem simultaneously.
Join now and you could find the next record-breaking prime! You could even win some cash.
Finding such a prime will be extremely difficult. A single test will take approximately 3 years on a Core 2 Duo computer. Your chance of success is roughly 1 in 2,000,000.
Every time something like this happens, I’m reminded of the incredible reliance of cryptography on prime numbers. Obviously, numbers this big are not exactly useful, but the process of discovering them could teach us something about primes in general. In any case, it’s an interesting mathematical achievement.
