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:

new prime numberwhere 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.

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