Guess What Your Tax Money Goes For

From the Sacramento Bee: Mathematicians at the University of Central Missouri have identified the largest prime number yet, but good luck remembering it.
The university said Wednesday that a group led by computer science and mathematics professor Curtis Cooper found the 17 million-digit prime number last month. It is the 48th known Mersenne prime and is the third discovered at the 11,800-student university in Warrensburg, about 50 miles east of Kansas City.
Primes are numbers such as 3, 7 and 11 that are divisible only by themselves and 1 without leaving a remainder.
Mersenne primes are named after the 17th century French mathematician who discovered them, Marin Mersenne. They're 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 57,885,161.
The number was independently verified using different programs running on different hardware, according to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, a cooperative in which underused computing power is harnessed to perform the calculations needed to find and verify Mersenne primes.  http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/06/5170734/mo-researchers-find-worlds-largest.htmlSome professor probably has spent half his time as a professor trying to figure out prime numbers.And for what?  How does it benefit mankind?  Will it help the unemployment rate?  But our tax money was spent doing this foolishness.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/06/5170734/mo-researchers-find-worlds-largest.html#storylink=cpy