Prime numbers

Miscellaneous Other Topics.
M. Henri Day
Grand Panjandrum
Posts: 1141
Joined: Tue Feb 15, 2005 8:24 am
Location: Stockholm, SVERIGE

Prime numbers

Postby M. Henri Day » Wed Mar 02, 2005 9:41 am

In case the need to while away a lazy afternoon turns up, why not follow the example of Dr Nowak, the German ophthalmatrist described in the article below, taken from today's Guardian ?...

Henri
German discovers longest prime number

Luke Harding in Berlin
Wednesday March 2, 2005

Guardian


A German eye specialist with a keen amateur interest in mathematics has discovered the world's largest prime number after a 50-day search using his personal computer.
Dr Martin Nowak, who has his own practice in the south German town of Michelfeld, stumbled upon the number last week, breaking the previous record for a prime number by half a million digits.

Prime numbers are divisible only by themselves and 1. While the first prime numbers 2, 3, 5, and 7, are easy to identify, Dr Nowak's monster prime number is more than 7.8m digits long and is written as 2 to the 25,964,951st power minus 1.

The number belongs to a special class of rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes, named after a 17th century French monk who first studied them 350 years ago. So far only 42 have been found.

Yesterday Dr Nowak was reluctant to talk about his discovery, made using a special programme on his 2.4GHz Pentium 4 computer. "He's busy. He has a full afternoon seeing patients. He's doesn't want to comment," a spokeswoman at Dr Nowak's clinic said.

The eye surgeon is one of thousands of volunteers using software provided by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (Gimps), a project to discover the holy grail of prime number research - a 10m-digit prime number. It took experts five days to work out that Dr Nowak's new number was indeed bigger than the previous biggest prime, discovered last May by an American. His number has 7,816,230 digits.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
曾记否,到中流击水,浪遏飞舟?

William
Junior Lexiterian
Posts: 95
Joined: Tue Feb 22, 2005 6:48 pm

Postby William » Tue Mar 15, 2005 9:41 pm

Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (Gimps)
Mathematicians do have a sense of humor.
I like prime numbers, though I lack the intellectual capacity to pursue the mega digit ones (or even the kilo digit ones).
So I won't be peacefully pursuing prodigious primes on those afternoons when I find myself at leisure.

However, I find fibonacci numbers fascinating too. They're more within the range of my impoverished intellect.
Check this out for some fibonacci fun.

(I wonder what the puzzle maker's intent was with Aphrodite and her "ones and twos").

William


Return to “Res Diversae”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 15 guests