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Largest Prime Number To Date Discovered
By nikkita | September 29, 2008
Welcome to the family 2^43,112,609-1!
GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) is a group of scientists that use distributed computing to crunch some pretty big numbers. Now these scientists have reason to celebrate as they have been awarded $100,000 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for discovering the largest prime number to date, 2^43,112,609-1. In other words, that’s a 13 million digit long number.
GIMPS still has their work cut out for them as the EFF will put up even bigger bucks for bigger numbers. For example, a prime number with 100 million digits will be awarded $150,000, but a prime number with 1 billion digits will cash in $250,000. A billion digit prime number? Yeah, this is about the point where my brain shuts off. Joe, I hope you read this because you may need to reboot me…
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