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Journalism of Courage
An eye surgeon in Germany has discovered the world8217;s largest known prime number 8212; or at least his computer did.
The surgeon, Dr. Martin Nowak of Michelfeld, is among thousands of participants in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, one of several big projects that tap idle computers worldwide. Last month, Nowak8217;s Pentium 4 computer concluded that a number it had been crunching on for more than 50 days was indeed prime, with only two integer divisors, 1 and itself.
A different computer using different software verified the result. The number, rendered in exponential shorthand, is 225,964,951-1. It has 7,816,230 digits, and if printed in its entirety, would fill 235 newspaper pages.
In addition, it falls in a rare category of primes known as Mersenne primes 8212; named after a 17-century French monk who first proposed the concept 8212; which can be written as 2n-1 where n is also prime. The first few Mersenne primes are easily verifiable 8212; inserting 2, 3 and 5 for n produces 3, 7 and 31, all prime 8212; but the math quickly becomes overwhelming for larger values.
The announcement did not, however, cause much of a stir because what mathematicians really want to know is: Are there an infinite number of such numbers? 8216;8216;Finding an additional prime doesn8217;t enlighten us very much,8217;8217; said Dr. Andrew M. Odlyzko, a mathematician at the University of Minnesota. The search nevertheless goes on, on about 75,000 computers.
