50th Known Mersenne Prime Found!
January 3, 2018 — Persistence pays off. Jonathan Pace, a GIMPS volunteer for over 14 years, discovered the 50th known Mersenne prime, 2^77,232,917-1 on December 26, 2017. The prime number is calculated by multiplying together 77,232,917 twos, and then subtracting one. It weighs in at 23,249,425 digits, becoming the largest prime number known to mankind. It bests the previous record prime, also discovered by GIMPS, by 910,807 digits.
Just how big is a 23,249,425 digit number? It's huge!! Big enough to fill an entire shelf of books totalling 9,000 pages! If every second you were to write five digits to an inch then 54 days later you'd have a number stretching over 73 miles (118 km) -- almost 3 miles (5 km) longer than the previous record prime.
Jonathan Pace is a 51 year old Electrical Engineer living in Germantown Tennessee. He is a long-time math enthusiast now working at FedEx and active in community charities. As SysAdmin for his charities, he runs Prime95 on all PCs and servers because GIMPS emails him if one doesn't check in, which is helpful for monitoring these remote computers from home or work. The PC that found the new prime took six days of intense computation on a quad-core Intel i5-6600 CPU to prove the number prime.
To be thorough, the prime number was independently verified with four different programs running on various hardware configurations.
In recognition of the individual discoverer, the software authors, the GIMPS project leaders, and every GIMPS participant's contribution, credit for the new prime goes to "Jonathan Pace, George Woltman, Scott Kurowski, Aaron Blosser, et al.".
Could you be the next lucky volunteer to discover a brand new Mersenne Prime? You'll need a reasonably modern PC and the free software at
www.mersenne.org/download/.
You can read a little more in the press release.
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