What Are Prime Numbers?

What Are Prime Numbers?

48th Known Mersenne Prime Discovered

mersenne.org

 ORLANDO, Florida — On January 25th at 23:30:26 UTC, the largest known prime number, 257,885,161-1, was discovered on Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) volunteer Curtis Cooper’s computer. The new prime number, 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, less one, has 17,425,170 digits.  With 360,000 CPUs peaking at 150 trillion calculations per second, 17th-year GIMPS is the longest continuously-running global “grassroots supercomputing” project in Internet history.

“Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”

—Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time

“Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”

—The curious incident of the dog in the night-time, Mark Haddon, 2003
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