A new largest prime was announced Saturday, two days ago! It is 2^5964951-1, which rings in at roughly 7.8 million digits. (600,000 more than the previous leader). Read about it here. If you're feeling masochistic you can see the actual number here. Not surprisingly it is also the 42nd Mersenne prime and was found using GIMPS. GIMPS is a network of roughly 60,000 computers using spare processing time toward finding the largest primes. If you want, you can download it and help out! GIMPS has had complete domination of current largest primes since it was launched in 1996.

Oh, by the way, the person who finds the first 10,000,000+ digit prime will be awarded $100,000 dollars by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, so get crackin' guys. *chuckle* If it happens to be found using GIMPS, the discoverer will be awarded $50,000.

Oh, and for those wondering what the big deal is about, this only usually happens every 2-3 years or so. :p Just a neat little tidbit that you would never see in the mainstream media and might interest some of you.

wow! 50 days for a computer like that to calculate the number? BTW, how big is the .txt file that holds the whole number?

Well, that's easy to answer. Text files are 1 byte per character, so if the number is 7.8 million digits, then the text file is 7.8 megs. And yeah, it takes anywhere from 20 days to 50ish depending on your processor to determine whether a potential Mersenne prime of such a large size is actually prime. Basically, the way GIMPS works is that you are assigned a unique exponent, such as 5964951 for your computer to process. As all Mersenne primes have a prime number as an exponent, this greatly reduces the possible exponents, but there are thousands of potential ones, so...

how do you pronounce that number?

"Two to the five-million, nine-hundred sixty-four thousand, nine-hundred fifty-one power minus one." :p

using that "to the power of" crap is for wusses?


i want a real mans answer!!

Okay but assuming I could verbally say 4 digits per second, it would take.. lessee.. 23 days to say it.

Is that the actual prime or an approximation?

ok, but in all seriousness... will this have any practical implications?

It may look like an approximation, but being able to be represented in that form is a nice effect of being a Mersenne prime, which is a rare type of prime number that can be factored in a special way. That is the actual prime.

And Stafford: yes. Primes are used for encryption, and the bigger the primes, the more secure.

[edit] But, if you used the largest and second largest primes, for example, it would not be practical to encrypt information using them, because it would take too long. However, they could be used once hardware comes up to snuff. So, basically, the answer is not really, but maybe in the future. [/edit]

Here's the first part of the binary expansion of the prime!

111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111.....



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