Newest Prime Number Discovered
The buzz about the new prime number isn’t really the latest news, but this discovery gathers quite a huge interest to day. Odd Magnar Strindmo from Melhus, Norway claimed that he had found the 47th Mersenne prime number last April 12. This IT professional used a 3.0 GHz Intel Core2 processor and this took him 29 days to calculate this 13-million-digit number. This 47th Mersenne prime number is not the largest number: the largest number was discovered last year. Tony Reix verified this feat independently using a different program that ran on his HPC servers.
I hope you had not forgotten what prime numbers are. Prime numbers are often taught at Elementary Math or Arithmetic in grade school. These numbers are divisible only by one and themselves. Typical examples of prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7 and 11.
Now Mersenne primes are a different breed. These prime numbers are equal to this formula:
where n must be a prime number.
Mersenne primes are not discovery made in the modern times. Ancient Greek mathematicians were still the first to discover and study these interesting primes.
There is actually an organization whose ultimate goal is to hunt Mersenne primes: Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search or GIMPS, which had been around since 1996.
WhatsaCoder
June 16th, 2009 at 10:45 pm #
Hmmmmm? I don’t know what’s the relevance of discovering this prime numbers. My dad always thought me that knowledge is useless if you’ll not apply it in real life…
Miguel
June 17th, 2009 at 1:51 am #
9 is not a prime number. It is divisible by 1, 3 and 9.
Gem
June 17th, 2009 at 2:57 am #
Just made the necessary correction. Thanks for pointing that out.
Reel Advice
June 17th, 2009 at 4:32 pm #
I have to agree with WhatsaCoder here. What’s the significance of this 47th Mersenne prime number?
Gem
June 17th, 2009 at 7:40 pm #
Same here. But we really never know when some other scientist in future takes this knowledge and apply this to good use.
Gem
June 17th, 2009 at 7:43 pm #
This may not be useful at the moment, but it may be of some very good use in the future.
Tyrone @ Millionaire Acts
July 7th, 2009 at 1:30 pm #
I have this thing also during my math education in Ateneo. I graduated BS Mathematics but during our math classes before, I can’t really understand the applications of the our lessons in real world. Our math is very theoretical and we do have a lot of out of this world theorems and concepts. That makes me very very sleepy during these kinds of lessons.
.-= Tyrone @ Millionaire Acts´s last blog ..Success Story of Chikka =-.
ven
July 11th, 2009 at 9:51 pm #
I think, there is no biggest prime # bcus # doesn’t end.