Current Events > The 50th known Mersenne Prime has been discovered.

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.mersenne.org/primes/press/M77232917.html

The new prime number, also known as M77232917, is calculated by multiplying together 77,232,917 twos, and then subtracting one. It is nearly one million digits larger than the previous record prime number, in a special class of extremely rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes. It is only the 50th known Mersenne prime ever discovered, each increasingly difficult to find. Mersenne primes were named for the French monk Marin Mersenne, who studied these numbers more than 350 years ago. GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered the last 16 Mersenne primes. Volunteers download a free program to search for these primes, with a cash award offered to anyone lucky enough to find a new prime. Prof. Chris Caldwell maintains an authoritative web site on the largest known primes, and has an excellent history of Mersenne primes.

The primality proof took six days of non-stop computing on a PC with an Intel i5-6600 CPU. To prove there were no errors in the prime discovery process, the new prime was independently verified using four different programs on four different hardware configurations.

Aaron Blosser verified it using Prime95 on an Intel Xeon server in 37 hours.
David Stanfill verified it using gpuOwL on an AMD RX Vega 64 GPU in 34 hours.
Andreas Hglund verified the prime using CUDALucas running on NVidia Titan Black GPU in 73 hours.
Ernst Mayer also verified it using his own program Mlucas on 32-core Xeon server in 82 hours. Andreas Hglund also confirmed using Mlucas running on an Amazon AWS instance in 65 hours.
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. The discovery is eligible for a $3,000 GIMPS research discovery award.

Though I will say for 14 years of work, $3000 is pretty small compensation. Still it's 46 million digits long and if you wanted to you could download the number off the link I shared. Still pretty interesting and long prime numbers like these are pretty good for encryption.
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3000 buckaroos for 14 years of work. Fuck math.
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Probably spent more on the electricity than he got for doing it
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Let me just say that I appreciate that the article lists the hardware that was used to test this number.
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DarthAragorn posted...

Probably spent more on the electricity than he got for doing it

Maybe. Though he lives in Tennessee which has pretty cheap electricity.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
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Bump.
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Maths are the devil.
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