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Full Version: Eye surgeon discovers the longest prime number (so far)
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As it's 7,816,230 digits long this forum is too small to contain it (as Pierre de Fermat would say). It can also be expressed as 2^{25,964,951} - 1.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/...82,00.html
For some reason i'm reminded of the illegal prime - a prime number that decodes into the gzipped C source for a PGP (i think it was PGP anyway) implementation.

Gareth Wrote:
the gzipped C source for a PGP ... implementation


Can you elaborate?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime

Wikiepedia sees and knows all  :wink:
Cool.  I just had an idea (prepare for run-on sentence):  you know how numbers are merely placeholders for concepts like difference, scale, etc.?, where an increase in number equates an increase in amount of something, and anyhow, in physics there is speculation (m theory, etc.) about how all the many parallel unis are membranes occupying varying levels (scales/directions/spaces/dimensions) of reality, and in accounting there is compounding, places/times/moments when the properties (numbers/amounts) are accounted for, all in relation to e, another natural constant?, and how in DNA/mRNA transcription there are small repeating units (sequences) that signify start/stop to the transcription mechanism?  Well, what if primes (what they represent physically) are a 3D uni's way of tagging these changes/points in scale/ratio/start/stop-points?  That they themselves are an almost-exponential system of cataloguing/instigation?
Someone had far too much time on their hands!!
I think it is a computer which does the work

Electric Dragon Wrote:
Someone had far too much time on their hands!!


man I hate it when someone says that about something I find wonderful Smile

Choose a three digit number without decimals.

Write the number twice so that you get a new six digit number.

Divide the number at the prime numbers 7, 13 and 11.

What number did you get?
Update from mersenne: On September 4, 2006, in the same room just a few feet away from their last find, Dr. Curtis Cooper and Dr. Steven Boone's CMSU team broke their own world record, discovering the 44th known Mersenne prime, 232,582,657-1. The new prime at 9,808,358 digits is 650,000 digits larger than their previous record prime found last December. However, the new prime falls short of the 10 million digits required for GIMPS to claim the Electronic Frontier Foundation $100,000 award.

Here is the team site to join in the search.  I am interested in checking out what their software is doing.

http://www.mersenne.org/
Sounds fun, but I'm too paranoid to download other people's software. Ah well.
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