Probable discovery of the 42nd Mersenne prime number announced 


MathWorld announced that George Woltman, the project organizer of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), has reported the probable discovery of the 42nd Mersenne prime. 

Mersenne numbers are numbers of the form 2n - 1. The 41st known Mersenne prime is 224,036,583 - 1, which has 7,235,733 decimal digits. It is currently the largest known prime number. Mathworld notes that the region between the 39th and 40th Mersenne primes has not yet been completely searched; so it is not certain that there is not an intervening Mersenne prime.

GIMPS runs on a world-wide distributed Internet computing system whose current sustained throughput is 16.866 trillion floating point operations per second. It is one of the most powerful computers in the world. It is composed of the shared computing resources of thousands of ordinary PCs. 

Posted: Saturday - February 19, 2005 at 12:38 AM          

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