Posted on 01/03/2006 6:43:08 PM PST by Jet Jaguar
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A team of researchers at Central Missouri State University has discovered the largest known prime number, university officials said Tuesday. The researchers, led by associate dean Steven Boone and mathematics professor Curtis Cooper, are affiliated with a worldwide computing project that uses volunteers to run software that searches for an elusive set of numbers called Mersenne primes. A prime number is a positive number that is only divisible by itself and one: 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on. Mersenne primes are a special category, expressed as 2 to the "p" power minus 1, where "p" also is a prime number. The team programmed 700 university computers to run the program years ago, Boone said. In mid-December, he said they found the world's largest prime number, known as M30402457. That's the same as 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus one, a number that is 9.1 million digits long. "We're super excited," said Boone, a chemistry professor. "We've been looking for such a number for a long time." The discovery is affiliated with the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, the global contest to find the world's largest Mersenne prime.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
Dang! I haven't finished memorizing the last one they found!
1 in M30402457. (Chances W will ever close the southern border).
The University of Arkansas was way ahead of Missouri on this, but then the unthinkable happened. The faculty ran out of fingers and toes.
fyi
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"You'll take this ping and like it, sucka!"
The radio news report said '2 to the 30,402,457th power,' leaving out the 'minus one', which is further evidence that news reporters are generally ignorant.
LOL! Humor only a math geek could appreciate. I'll be chuckling about this for days.
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