47th Known Mersenne Prime Found! (GIMPS)

[eppur_se_muova]

On April 12th, the 47th known Mersenne prime, 2^42,643,801-1, a 12,837,064 digit number was found by Odd Magnar Strindmo from Melhus, Norway! This prime is the second largest known prime number, a "mere" 141,125 digits smaller than the Mersenne prime found last August.

Odd is an IT professional whose computers have been working with GIMPS since 1996 testing over 1400 candidates. This calculation took 29 days on a 3.0 GHz Intel Core2 processor.

The prime was independently verified June 12th by Tony Reix of Bull SAS in Grenoble, France using the Glucas program running on Bull NovaScale HPC servers, one featuring Itanium2 CPUs and another featuring Nehalem EX CPUs.

Perfectly Scientific, Dr. Crandall's company which developed the FFT algorithm used by GIMPS, makes souvenir posters you can order. You'll need a good magnifying glass to read all 12.8 million digits!

Chris Caldwell maintains an excellent web site on prime numbers. See his page on Mersenne Primes and their history.

This is the 13th Mersenne prime found by GIMPS in its 13 year history. To join GIMPS, follow these instructions

http://v5www.mersenne.org/

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Damn. They beat me to it.

[ORDagnabbit]

2. no offense but .... so what? why does it matter?

[eppur_se_muova]

3. To a fair extent, the answer is ... we don't know yet.

It seems like it shouldn't be that hard to discern the pattern(s) in Mersenne prime exponents, but none has been found. We don't even know if the number of Mersenne primes is finite or not.

"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." -- Wehrner von Braun

[Indenturedebtor]

5. Well...

It was probably cheap research, and all cheap research is definately good research :) Someday someone will probably find a pattern... who knows? Maybe that pattern will allow you to levitate by singing a backstreet boys song while holding an avocado. :shrug:

[Thor_MN]

7. if I had to sing a backstreet boys song, it wouldn't be worth it...

The avocado, I could live with...

[byronius]

6. Mathematics reflects the universe.

Everything starts with math. It's the original assisting software of discovery, and I postulate will be dramatically important to advancing artificial intelligence.

It's strange how an artificial construct could so perfectly mesh with the the universe it describes. Almost as if everything is being run using math.

Blue Pill? Red Pill?

[one_true_leroy]

8. Chicken or eggs?

"It's strange how an artificial construct could so perfectly mesh with the the universe it describes."

Who's to say that math is an artificial construct? It may well be the ideal that Plato would have said is being imperfectly reflected in this world. When this ideal is manifest, it is subject to chaos (physicists call it noise, non-linear dynamics, and quantum fluctuations) and is 'corrupted.' What's amazing is not that it is an artificial construct that meshes as you described, but that human minds have been able to stare at the corrupted form in Nature and deduce the ideal form in Math. In this sense, Math then becomes more real than Nature.

[timeforpeace]

4. And not a moment too soon.