An illustration of how 12 is not a prime number, but 11 is. Two new records for the largest known  have been set, both breaking the 10 million digit threshold. On August 23, Edson Smith, a systems engineer for the Program in Computing laboratory at the  in California, United States, confirmed the primality of the number through his work as a volunteer in the project known as the , or GIMPS. This new prime number is expressed as two to the 43,112,609th power minus one, and consists of 12,978,189 decimal digits when written out. This number qualifies GIMPS for a $100,000 award from the (EFF), offered to the first person or group to discover a prime number of 10 million digits or more. According to GIMPS' prize agreement, $ 50,000 will be given to the UCLA Department of Mathematics, $25,000 will be given to charity, $20,000 will be split among previous discoverers of Mersenne primes, and GIMPS will keep the remainder for funding and other uses. Smith, who was contacted by Scientific American by phone, said that the discovery was "quite unexpected."
An illustration of how 12 is not a prime number, but 11 is. Two new records for the largest known prime number have been set, both breaking the 10 million digit threshold. On August 23, Edson Smith, a systems engineer for the Program in Computing laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles in California, United States, confirmed the primality of the number through his work as a volunteer in the project known as the , or GIMPS. This new prime number is expressed as two to the 43,112,609th power minus one, and consists of 12,978,189 decimal digits when written out. This number qualifies GIMPS for a $100,000 award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), offered to the first person or group to discover a prime number of 10 million digits or more. According to GIMPS' prize agreement, $ 50,000 will be given to the UCLA Department of Mathematics, $25,000 will be given to charity, $20,000 will be split among previous discoverers of Mersenne primes, and GIMPS will keep the remainder for funding and other uses. Smith, who was contacted by Scientific American by phone, said that the discovery was "quite unexpected."
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prime number
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University of California, Los Angeles
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$100,000 award from the (EFF), offered to the first person or group to discover a prime number of 10 million digits or more. According to GIMPS' prize agreement, $
$100,000 award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), offered to the first person or group to discover a prime number of 10 million digits or more. According to GIMPS' prize agreement, $