New Prime Number

mathew

UCLA mathematicians have discovered a 13 million digit prime number.
They won the Electronic Frontier Foundation prize of $100,000 for finding it.

Hard to get your head around 13 million digits.......... so I calculated the number :P linkey
Its over 190,000 lines long.

The file is 12.6MB

Jonathan

Dont go hogging all my bandwidth now

LeixlipRed

I found a new prime number. I'm not telling anyone what it is though till I've cashed the cheque....

Mr. Presentable

Have they nothing better to do? Really, all that intelligence to find something of absolutely no use.

ZorbaTehZ

nipplenuts wrote: »

Have they nothing better to do? Really, all that intelligence to find something of absolutely no use.

I'd argue that that's the appeal of it.

Jonathan

nipplenuts wrote: »

all that intelligence to find something of absolutely no use.

Encryption? :rolleyes:

Mr. Presentable

jmccrohan wrote: »

Encryption? :rolleyes:

Please explain. I am fascinated to know what you mean.

Jonathan

nipplenuts wrote: »

Please explain. I am fascinated to know what you mean.

http://www.cpaadvisor.us/sub/8_encryption.htm

Mr. Presentable

So, what we are saying here is that an encription that already would take millenia to crack has been made safer?

Mark200

nipplenuts wrote: »

So, what we are saying here is that an encription that already would take millenia to crack has been made safer?

Exciting isn't it? :P

Jonathan

Mark200 wrote: »

Exciting isn't it? :P

It will be your job to crack it

M.T. Cranium

Are they sure it's not a multiple of

19786216789123271890521785901237821950721894502173 ?

mathew

M.T. Cranium wrote: »

Are they sure it's not a multiple of

19786216789123271890521785901237821950721894502173 ?

Why not check. Should be just a simple matter of some long division..

Pherekydes

M.T. Cranium wrote: »

Are they sure it's not a multiple of

19786216789123271890521785901237821950721894502173 ?

That's not a prime.

17 divides it, obviously. :rolleyes:

And 1163895105242545405324810935366930702983640853069, even more obviously.

sd123

For their next prime number why don't they use 2^p - 1, where p = 13 million digit prime number? I believe that I read before that this formula for mersenne prime numbers only hold few times. Is that right?

Pherekydes

sd123 wrote: »

For their next prime number why don't they use 2^p - 1, where p = 13 million digit prime number? I believe that I read before that this formula for mersenne prime numbers only hold few times. Is that right?

That's only the 46th known Mersenne prime!

To sub in this new prime for p would lead to a calculation taking millenia. The new prime found has p with 8 digits.

Pgibson

nipplenuts wrote: »

Have they nothing better to do? Really, all that intelligence to find something of absolutely no use.

NOTHING could be further from the truth.

To decript every encrypted document in the world just do this simple task:

Find a pattern in the distribution of Primes.

You will win every mathematics prize there is to win..and bring all business done on-line to a grinding halt.

.

jackdaw

mathew wrote: »

UCLA mathematicians have discovered a 13 million digit prime number.
They won the Electronic Frontier Foundation prize of $100,000 for finding it.

Hard to get your head around 13 million digits.......... so I calculated the number :P linkey
Its over 190,000 lines long.

The file is 12.6MB

what program did you use to calculate the number =?

Jonathan

jackdaw wrote: »

what program did you use to calculate the number =?

It was done using some command line calculator in mac osx. Cant remember the name of it off the top of my head.. I'm sure mathew will have it..

rjt

nipplenuts wrote: »

Have they nothing better to do? Really, all that intelligence to find something of absolutely no use.

We have no idea what will be useful in the future, and we'd be nowhere near as advanced as we are now if people had only done things that had immediate practical results. 100 years ago, number theory had practically no real applications. Yet people studied it anyway. And it's a damned good thing they did, because we've now come to depend on it for cryptography - a very practical real nowadays (eg. internet security).

But besides all of that, as ZorbaTehZ said, this is something a lot of people would do anyway, just for the sake of doing it.

mathew

jackdaw wrote: »

what program did you use to calculate the number =?

Its a UNIX command line calculator called bc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bc_(Unix)

Michael Collins

rjt wrote: »

We have no idea what will be useful in the future...

Precisely. Take Boolean Algebra for example. This is mathematical description of logic, invented by Geoge Boole back in the mid 1800s. It was thought to have little or no practical applications, in fact the only place where you'd be likely to come across it was in philosophy lectures, where logic is a key concept.

But then lo and behold computers came about and it was the perfect language to describe how to deal with ones and zeros using electronic circuits.

There's many other examples of this aswell. Quantum Mechanics and Group Theory. Communication Systems and Linear Algebra...

Silenceisbliss

Use prime 95

although it will just eat up most of your PC's and spit them out...

google it, and download. limitation of a 25 million digit number though IIRC

CreepingDeath

Pherekydes wrote: »

That's only the 46th known Mersenne prime!

Yeah, there's not many primes left now that the sub-prime market has collapsed.

LeixlipRed

CreepingDeath wrote: »

Yeah, there's not many primes left now that the sub-prime market has collapsed.

Taxi!

Pgibson

CreepingDeath wrote: »

Yeah, there's not many primes left now that the sub-prime market has collapsed.

I just found out that the number of Euros in my bank account is no longer a Real Number.

Now its an Irrational Number.

.

LeixlipRed

Ffs lads, I'm gonna start dishing out bans if the jokes don't improve :rolleyes:

Pgibson

Pgibson wrote: »

I just found out that the number of Euros in my bank account is no longer a Real Number.
Now its an Irrational Number..

Just checked my Icelandic bank account again today.

Drat.

The Irrational number is now an Imaginary Number.

.

SonOfPerdition

i'm reading "the music of the primes" at the moment, fascinating read and recommended regardless of your background. I'm no matematician, and i find some of it hard to understand, but its still a great read.