Josh Findley, a volunteer in the Mersenne.org research project called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), has discovered the largest known prime number. Findley used his home PC and free software by George Woltman and Scott Kurowski as part of an international grid of 240,000 networked computers in virtually every time zone of the world. The new number, expressed as 2 to the 24,036,583th power minus 1, has 7,235,733 decimal digits and was discovered May 15th. It is nearly a million digits larger than the previous largest known prime number, and belongs to a special class of rare prime numbers called Mersenne primes . The discovery marks only the 41st known Mersenne prime, named after Marin Mersenne , a 17th century French monk who first studied the rare numbers 300 years ago. Mersenne primes are most relevant to number theory, but most participants join GIMPS simply for the fun of having a role in real research - and the chance of finding a new Mersenne prime.
posted by Marcus Zillman |
4:10 AM
