Largest Prime Number Discovered
An amazing thing happened today in the world of mathematics: a number expressed as 2 to the 20,996,011th power minus 1, which has 6,320,430 digits, was discovered to be prime. This may not hold any significance for you directly but to mathematicians, cryptogists, musicians as well as others, this is big news…
In an article over at Mersenne.org, details are given about the number, how it was, who found it, etc. Here’s a quote:
Prime numbers have long fascinated amateur and professional mathematicians. An integer greater than one is called a prime number if its only divisors are one and itself. The first prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc. For example, the number 10 is not prime because it is divisible by 2 and 5. A Mersenne prime is a prime of the form 2P-1. The first Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31, 127, etc. There are only 40 known Mersenne primes.
An integer greater than one is called a prime number if its only positive divisors are one and itself. For example, the number 10 is not prime because it is divisible by 2 and 5. A Mersenne prime is a prime of the form 2P-1. Mersenne primes have been central to number theory since they were first discussed by Euclid in 350 BC. The man whose name they now bear, the French monk Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), made a famous conjecture on which values of p would yield a prime. It took 300 years and several important discoveries in mathematics to settle his conjecture.
This is only the 40th Mersenne prime number so far. It is over 2 million digits larger than the previous record holder but not quite large enough for the $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for a ten million digit prime number. That a lot of money for you not having to do anything but install a program on your computer that runs in the background!
Here is another article from Of Prime Importance on the subject.
