Jonathan Pace, an electrical engineer from Tennessee, is lucky winner. And he wrote mamatics history: On 26 December last year, his computer calculated five fiftieth Mersenne prime. This number would have been advertised 23,249,425 posts. It is currently largest known prime; Printed out would fill a book with 9,000 pages. The fact that Pace's calculator was right was confirmed on 3 January by Internet Project great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (Gimps), a worldwide merger of mamaticians and software developers who have been searching for Mersenne primes for more than 20 years Coordinated.

Prime numbers are numbers greater than one, which are only divisible by mselves and one. Already in antiquity re were people who were fascinated by succession of se numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11,...: Almost 2,500 years ago, Euclid was supposed to have established one of most famous evidences of mamatics by showing very elegantly that sequence of prime numbers never ends.

Also monk and mamatician Marin Mersenne, who in 16th century dealt with patterns in numbers, was among prime-enthusiastic. He had a special kind of prime numbers: primes that are created by multiplying number 2 a few times with itself and n pulling 1 off result. 3 is smallest example of such a "Mersenne prime": 2 times 2 minus 1. The Mersenne prime, which is now found, is five fiftieth in series of Mersenne prime numbers; It is created by multiplying number 2 by a total of 77,232,917 times with itself and n pulling 1. Curiously, Mersenne himself has not discovered any of prime numbers named after him today; In his time, only seven primes of this form were known. The largest of se was 524,287; It is created by multiplying 2 total 19 times by itself and n pulling 1.

Encryption algorithms are based on prime numbers

By 1900, just three more examples were added. It is difficult to calculate large primes, and it is more difficult to try to locate Mersenne primes from usual primes. But at turn of 20th century, a gold-digging mood broke out among Mersenne prime-seekers, due to a mamatical discovery: The Frenchman Edouard Lucas had developed a relatively simple test with which one can use ordinary Mersenne numbers – that is, two potencies minus 1 – can n check wher y are also prime numbers or wher y contain or dividers than 1 and mselves.

The test was later improved by American Derrick Loamer and accelerated as a "Lucas Loamer test" The search for Mersenne prime numbers. Finding very large primes is still very difficult in general – this is due to security of current encryption algorithms, among or things. Mersenne prime numbers can be calculated with some computational effort if you take Lucas Loamer test to rescue.

1996 – At that time 33 Mersenne primes were already known – a team of software developers and mamaticians made fun of Gimps project, which has since been dedicated to prime-number mining. The software was based on a tricky version of Lucas-loamer-Test, which can be run distributed on many computers, so that you can run computational work on a network on many machines at same time; Currently, more than 180,000 people worldwide are torturing over 1.6 million computer processors to find Mersenne prime numbers. One of m is Jonathan Pace.

A concrete benefit does not have its trouble – it is seen that one can become famous and possibly one day with prime number search even rich: for discovery of a Mersenne prime with 100 million digits or more is from Electronic Frontier Foundation A price of 150,000 dollars is advertised.

Date Of Update: 06 January 2018, 12:04