> Jonathan Pace is a 51-year old Electrical Engineer living in Germantown, Tennessee. Perseverance has finally paid off for Jon - he has been hunting for big primes with GIMPS for over 14 years.<p>What a great story.
so I didn't know this, but got curious about how many known prime there are - I knew there were infinite primes, but thought that there would be some concrete list of all the primes that we had discovered somewhere - but apparently not<p><a href="https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/272791/how-many-prime-numbers-are-known" rel="nofollow">https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/272791/how-many-pri...</a><p>> Nobody's really keeping count. ... There are very many hundred-digit primes to find. We could cover the Earth in harddisks full of distinct hundred-digit primes to a height of hundreds of meters, without even making a dent in the supply of hundred-digit primes.
tl;dr The 50th Mersenne prime was just found by a volunteer of the GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) project. It is 2^77,232,917-1 and has 23,249,425 digits. Mersenne primes are extremely rare and are always of the form 2^p-1 for some positive integer p. The first four Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31, and 127.
But why?<p>One answer is a bit buried in a sub link in the article. On that page, you’ll find arguments for the following reasons: tradition, by products of the quest, collection of rare mathematical things, glory, pushing hardware performance, and contest rewards.<p>Personally I’m forced to admit I enjoy seeing them found while being unable to form any cogent justification.<p><a href="http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html" rel="nofollow">http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html</a>
Prime numbers are amazing.<p>I was watching a math documentary and one example was a Cicada in North Carolina that only emerges once every thirteen years millions of them at once. It's a defense mechanism the sheer number overwhelms predators. The Cicada does this also to avoid appearing when another species of Cicada appears to prevent cross breeding.<p>The other species in the same region emerges every 7 years. The two will only emerge at the same time every 220 years (I think it as).<p>Smart bugs!
January looks to be a good month for discovering large prime numbers! As a former contributor to the project it would be great to have a primer on the best way to contribute today, covering the options for CPUs vs GPUs and the various projects for factorizations vs primality tests.
TIL I work at the same company as the discoverer of the 50th known Mersenne Prime.<p>I know at least one sysadmin who used GIMPS as a burn-in program for new servers.....
As someone who knows nothing about advanced mathematics, could someone explain why this matters? (i.e. beyond that this is rare and theoretically interesting)
Is there a web service where you can buy a large number with certain length? Not a Mersenne prime, but just a number and/or a prime?<p>It needs to comply with the 2^n-1 formula.
Let's say I want a number long 100 000 000 or even 1 000 000 000 long. Or a prime above that length.<p>Do you know how much would that cost per number prime and non-prime?
Curious: can bitcoin mining rigs be modified for BOINC projects (GIMPS, Seti@Home, etc.)? If yes, than I might invest in some rigs and modify them to run BOINC.<p>Yes, I'm weird: I prefer to do computation for BOINC than for bitcoin. :-)
There is rarely a submission here on Hacker News that has comments of such bad quality as this submission has.<p>I see a similar phenomenon with press. They "hype" something they barely understand, change parts of the story to make it more interesting, or invent new words (Cyber!). This is a disservice.<p>What do you do to avoid this noise?