New Mersenne Prime Number Discovered: Its 13 Million Digits Long!

Posted by Alex in Science & Tech on September 28, 2008 at 1:40 am


UCLA mathematician Edson Smith and colleagues have found a really, really large prime number: it’s 13 million digits long!

The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was verified by a different computer system running a different algorithm. [...]

Mersenne primes — named for their discoverer, 17th-century French mathematician Marin Mersenne — are expressed as 2P-1, or two to the power of "P" minus one. P is itself a prime number. For the new prime, P is 43,112,609.

Thousands of people around the world have been participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, a cooperative system in which underused computing power is harnessed to perform the calculations needed to find and verify Mersenne primes.

Link - Thanks cjdavis!

To visualize how large the prime number 243,112,609 - 1 really is, if you print out the number at 75 digits per line and 50 lines per page, it would be almost 3,500 pages long!

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COMMENT

11 comments to "New Mersenne Prime Number Discovered: Its 13 Million Digits Long!"

  1. Sofar
    September 28th, 2008 at 2:17 am

    That’s a very big number. Like that’s too big to describe the amount of anything in the universe. Like uh, helium atoms. I think that’s the most numerous thing there is, I can’t remember.

  2. Peeves
    September 28th, 2008 at 3:13 am

    I can’t wrap my head around the fact that numbers can be discovered or people want to discover such things.

  3. dgaicun
    September 28th, 2008 at 6:23 am

    OMERGAH!,

    I just discovered the largest number that ever did be discovered:

    10googolgoogolgoogolgoogolgoogolgoogol

    I call it a Bazooglenoodlebooglekitnkaboodleplex

    Alert the media! Update Wikipedia! Oh, and I have many more discoveries to come. Nine super computers in my basement are working full time to keep multiplying that little superscript.

  4. dgaicun
    September 28th, 2008 at 6:31 am

    Aaarghh! Ok, well, just open your souls and try and imagine the glorious new number in the previous comment as if the brown-shirted commie-nazi islamo-fascists at Neatorama actually allowed the superscript tag.

  5. CJ
    September 28th, 2008 at 9:16 am

    calm down, man.

  6. A Noun
    September 28th, 2008 at 9:49 am

    Don’t let the Treasury Department see the number, or they’ll want that instead of 700 billion!

  7. Just Some Guy
    September 28th, 2008 at 1:44 pm

    dgaicun - I humbly submit ( your number+ 1) , as being a number that is larger than (your number).

    But keep up the search

  8. satria
    September 28th, 2008 at 2:34 pm

    hei… I read your information from begining to the end and I think that is interesting information.. I think i will tell this information again to my friend and I hope this information will be usefull for them… oh yes I suggest you to check my blog on http://101aboutcomputer.blogspot.com/ , I hope the article on my blog will be usefull for you… and we can share each other. thank you… ;-)

  9. b°b
    September 29th, 2008 at 4:32 am

    I just discovered a very (very) large prime letter in my backyard!

  10. Ollie
    October 3rd, 2008 at 3:44 am

    What is the point of this whole exercise?

  11. Icemannwt
    November 29th, 2008 at 2:56 pm

    Ideed. What good is it? For the sake of arguement lets assume it is the largest possible Prime Number. What in your humble opinion does it represent; the number of possible Parallel Universes, Infinity, God?


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