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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: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Thursday October 24 2024, @03:11AM (2 children)
Much more than 2 pages. The number has roughly 136 million digits in base 2. Divide by 4 and that's still 34 million. At 6000 hexadecimal digits per page, that's a bit more than 5667 pages.
Like all but the first few entries of the Ackermann function, it's in the class of numbers that are so large they're not worth writing out. Much bigger numbers than a piddly googol. Always better to represent them with a short formula, if possible. Can reach such large numbers that a formula is the only practical way to represent them. It can be astonishing how quickly work that produces numbers that take thousand of pages to write out can grow in size until there aren't enough atoms in the entire observable universe to print the numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2024, @05:25AM
Ohhh damn, you're right.
I was thinking about it in terms of a "random" prime, but it's 1000000-1 == 1111111. :-/ So *all* of them are FFF....
Whoops.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday October 24 2024, @07:39PM
That's a lot more ink than printing thousands of pages of colons or semicolons.
For some odd reason all scientific instruments searching for intelligent life are pointed away from Earth.