SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the 2-3-5-7-11-13-17-19-23-29-... dept.
https://www.mersenne.org/primes/?press=M136279841
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered the largest known prime number, 2136,279,841-1, having 41,024,320 decimal digits. Luke Durant, from San Jose, California, found the prime on October 12th.
The new prime number, also known as M136279841, is calculated by multiplying together 136,279,841 twos, and then subtracting 1. It is over 16 million digits larger than the previous record prime number, in a special class of extremely rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes. It is only the 52nd known Mersenne prime ever discovered, each increasingly more difficult to find. Mersenne primes were named for the French monk Marin Mersenne, who studied these numbers more than 350 years ago. GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered the last 18 Mersenne primes. Volunteers download a free program to search for these primes, with a $3000 award offered to anyone lucky enough to find a new prime. Prof. Chris Caldwell founded an authoritative web site on the largest known primes which is now maintained by volunteers, and has an excellent history of Mersenne primes.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Thursday October 24 2024, @12:41AM (1 child)
The software replaces spaces with dashes for what is in the Department field. It is so that a name can be created for the department out of a short (hopefully sometimes funny or insightful) sentence. Perhaps one should capitalize the first letters in each word to do it properly, or enclose it in parentheses, but dashes also work, and perhaps was easier to code? So if one put "department of redundancy" in the Department field, you'd get in Slashcode from the department-of-redundancy dept., though perhaps one would rather have from the Department of Redundancy Department or from the "department of redundancy" dept.
It is problematic if one puts punctuation there, such as commas. I have found that you can put in HTML spaces and they won't get replaced by dashes the first time they render, but the HTML turns into regular spaces when the story is submitted. When an editor goes in later and reviews the submission and posts it, that HTML code isn't there and those spaces then get replaced by dashes.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Thursday October 24 2024, @12:43AM
I forgot to add that I removed the commas so at least it looks like a sequence of positive integers again.