Dittohead, Snow Flake, and Bushbot, so what of it?
Posted on 01/04/2006 12:34:38 PM PST by mlc9852
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Researchers at a Missouri university have identified the largest known prime number, officials said Tuesday.
The team at Central Missouri State University, led by associate dean Steven Boone and mathematics professor Curtis Cooper, found it in mid-December after programming 700 computers years ago.
A prime number is a positive number divisible by only itself and 1 — 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on.
The number that the team found is 9.1 million digits long. It is a Mersenne prime known as M30402457 — that's 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1.
Mersenne primes are a special category expressed as 2 to the "p" power minus 1, in which "p" also is a prime number.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
...interesting. I had believed in an infinite prime number and this discovery shakes my faith a bit.
Please tell me tax $$ did not go into this.
prime pong
I learned about prime numbers in high school, but never learned what they are used for. Divisible only by itself and one, so what?
Can a FReeper math genius please tell us what you use a prime number for?
Why do they package food in prime number increments? I like to divide up the meal evenly and it messes me up. I hate prime numbers!
Ehhh, big deal. My cat dialed that number last night.
> This doesn't mean anything to me but it certainly sounds interesting. I guess we do still have some smart people in the US!
Prime numbers are fascinating! True. Finding them (and factoring them to prove they are Prime) is, to some people, just as much fun as crossword puzzles. By definition, all prime numbers bar two are odd numbers (think about it!) To know that a certain number is only divisible by itself and one -- well, that's really cool. And the bigger the number, the rarer the Prime...
(alright, I confess. I have a Prime Number fetish...)
It also is the number value of the national debt.
For one thing, they're heavily used in cryptography, as well as many applications in computer programming and computer science. They're also at the heart of many mathematical proofs on other aspects of mathematics, etc.
Count all the even numbers to infinity. You will find there are more even numbers than even + odd numbers combined.
That should keep you busy for a bit.
;-)
A prime number is necessary to receive signals from other dimensions so that we can build a machine to visit far away galaxies.
The movie Contact starring Jodie Foster told me. ;^)
Very large prime numbers are used to generate keys in encryption systems.
Modern cryptology, the mathematics that allows amongst other things, secure internet information transfers is dependent upon prime numbers.
Prime numbers are used in data encryption algorithms. The larger the prime number you use, the more difficult it is to crack the encryption.
This discovery will actually have a tangible benefit to anybody whose financial data is kept by other people.
Dittohead, Snow Flake, and Bushbot, so what of it?
It's taking Mo. and Mo. researchers to find these larger prime numbers.
Corrrection: cryptography – I hate windows spell check! Sheesh!
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