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.
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