Discovered a new largest Prime number

2018-01-05 20:35

Discovered a new largest Prime number
International collaboration GIMPS announced the discovery of a new largest known Prime numbers decimal into a million bits exceeds the previous one.

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26 Dec 2017 participants in GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) project volunteer computing on the search for Mersenne primes confirmed the discovery of a new very large Prime number, reports Rus.Media. Allow it is impossible, in decimal notation it consists of 23 249 425 characters in the book, recording that number would be about seven thousand pages.

The number that received the designation M77232917 represents a power of two minus 1; the exponent is equal to 77 232 917. The previous largest known Prime number, discovered in January 2016, had a million characters shorter.

M77232917 belongs to the set of Mersenne numbers (Mn=2n-1, where M and n are primes), named after French mathematician of the XVII century Marina Mersenne. Like all primes, Mersenne primes are divided evenly only on themselves and one. The new number became 50-m account proven Mersenne number.

Chris Caldwell (Chris Caldwell), one of the leaders of the project GIMPS, surprised that the new record high Prime number was found so soon. “Typically, to look for Prime numbers is like finding dead cats on the road: they are rare, and you don’t expect to find a new one immediately after the last one,” he explained to British newspaper.

The project GIMPS uses the computing resources of the computers of volunteers around the world to look for large Prime numbers. Tuesday, December 26, computer the 51-year-old electrician from Tennessee Jonathan pace, completing a six-day marathon of calculations that found the number of candidate; a few more days left to confirm that M77232917 meets the definition of a Prime number. To confirm the result in different computers went from 34 to 82 hours. This is the first Prime number that is calculated on the computer Hair in 14 years of participation in the project; it opened the owner of the computer will receive the reward of three thousand dollars.