Beyond Astronomical

1 October 2008



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Mathematicians at UCLA Find 13-Million-Digit Prime Number

Wall Street has been throwing around some big numbers lately, $700 billion being the most common. However, mathematicians at UCLA have been pushing the boundaries of their field. Using a 75-computer network running Windows XP, they discovered a 13-million-digit prime number. They might have won a $100,000 prize for their efforts.

UCLA's Edson Smith, the leader of the effort told the press, “We’re delighted. Now, we're looking for the next one, despite the odds.” Clearly, he’s a numbers guy not a words guy. And he’s an ambitious one, rather like a mountain climber who comes down from Everest and says, “Hey, last one up K2 is a rotten egg.”

The value of hunting prime numbers is also a bit like mountain climbing. It has little to do with the practical application (although primes do come in handy in cryptography) and much to do with the challenge. As Edson Smith said on a UCLA FAQ about his project, people look for primes “For the same reasons that people climb mountains, sail unknown seas, and explore the cosmos. It's a challenge! It's exciting to push the envelope of Computational Mathematics and to search for something unknown that you believe is out there. As bonus, unlike the explorers of old, we get to sit in comfortable office chairs while we're searching!”

UCLA also said,

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS ) has announced the discovery of two new Mersenne prime numbers, one of them found on a computer of the UCLA Mathematics department. A Mersenne prime is one of the form 2P-1, and UCLA's new prime has P=43,112,609. The department is a proud contributor of computing time for GIMPS and credit for the discovery will go to Edson Smith from UCLA's Mathematics Computing Group (MCG ), George Woltman, Scott Kurowski, et al. UCLA's prime is the first explicitly known prime with more than 10 million decimal digits, a discovery for which the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF ) has announced an award of $100,000. When EFF confirms the discovery, the department will share this award according to rules set by GIMPS. The new prime is not the first Mersenne Prime to be found at UCLA. In 1952, Professor Raphael Robinson used UCLA's SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer) computer to find five distinct Mersenne Primes with P equals 521, 607, 1279, 2203 and 2281. These were the first Mersenne Primes discovered in over 75 years, and the first to be discovered using computers. In 1962, Alexander Hurwitz found two more Mersenne primes (P=4253 and P=4423) using UCLA's IBM 7090 computer.
And Wall Street thinks 700,000,000,000 is a big number.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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