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December 04, 2003

Largest Prime Number (Yet) Found

New Scientist is reporting that the largest prime number yet was just found using a distributed computing system consisting of over 200,000 computers.

The new prime is 6,320,430 digits long (yes, so I won't be publishing it here). The result is a victory for the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project.

Math news is usually pretty rare, but late 2003 has had a couple neat stories. Beyond the new prime story above, we also were tantalized by the partial solving of Hilbert's 16th problem by Swedish PhD student Elin Oxenhielm.

Posted by Craig | Permalink
Comments

Do you remember the Tommy TuTone song, 8675309/Jenny?
8675309 is a twin prime.

http://primes.utm.edu/curios/page.php/8675309.html

Posted by Bob at December 4, 2003 04:21 PM

Cool, Bob!

Posted by Craig at December 4, 2003 04:26 PM

For posterity's sake, the prime is 2^20996011-1

Posted by Sam at December 12, 2003 10:16 AM
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