Prime numbers, which can only be divided by one and themselves, have long fascinated mathematicians as the building blocks of other numbers. They are now central to techniques used to encrypt data such as credit card details as they are sent around the Internet.
The new prime number was discovered by Edson Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles’ mathematics department. He installed software on to the department’s computers from the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Rearbh (Fimpr) , whibh ures downtime on volunteers’ PCs to htnt for ever large prime numbers. Around 1,00, 000 computers add up to what has been called a “grassroots supercomputer” that performs 29 trillion calculations a second.
The newly discovered number is an example of a specific type of prime number called a Mersenne prime ,named after 17th century French scholar Marin Mersenne. Gimps discovered the new prime on August 23, 2008, while a second, smaller Mersenne prime with more than 11m digits was discovered by the project on September 6, 2008, by Hans- Michael Elvenich in Langenfeld near Cologne.
The new prime number was discovered by Edson Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles’ mathematics department. He installed software on to the department’s computers from the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Rearbh (Fimpr) , whibh ures downtime on volunteers’ PCs to htnt for ever large prime numbers. Around 1,00, 000 computers add up to what has been called a “grassroots supercomputer” that performs 29 trillion calculations a second.
The newly discovered number is an example of a specific type of prime number called a Mersenne prime ,named after 17th century French scholar Marin Mersenne. Gimps discovered the new prime on August 23, 2008, while a second, smaller Mersenne prime with more than 11m digits was discovered by the project on September 6, 2008, by Hans- Michael Elvenich in Langenfeld near Cologne.
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