Thursday, December 11, 2003

New Scientist reports that the a college student has discovered the largest known prime number. The new number is 6,320,430 digits long.The new number can be represented as 220,996,011-1. It is only the 40th Mersenne prime to have ever been found.
The new prime number was found as a part of project GIMPS, in which volunteers donate computer time to help this research project, much like the well known SETI@home project.



posted by Liberty @ 8:01 PM