New Mersenne Prime

Monday 31 May 2004 at 2:32 pm | In Articles | Post Comment

It’s not often that one can report mathematics news but two weeks ago a new Mersenne prime was discovered. A Mersenne prime is a prime number of the form 2^p-1 ie one less than a power of two. It is easy to show that p itself must also be prime. The new prime number is 2^{24,036,583}-1 has 7,235,733 decimal digits and was found on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 computer running Windows XP.

You can help search for larger primes and possibly win $100,000 for discovering the first 10-million-digit prime. See the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS)

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