"The largest prime in history" updated for about two years, the 50th Mersenne prime, the number of digits is 23.24 million 9425 digits

byjon jordan

NewMersenne prime"Great Internet · Mersenne number search (GIMPS)" searching for the 50 th Mersenne prime that is the largest known prime number. A new prime number is "2^{77, 232, and 917}-1"so,"M77232917It is called.

50th Known Mersenne Prime Discovered
https://www.mersenne.org/primes/press/M77232917.html


Mersenne prime refers to a prime number among Mersenne numbers which is "a natural number less than 1 to the power of 2".

According to GIMPS, the 50th Mersenne prime "M77232917" is 23,249,494 digits, the 49th Mersenne prime, which was the longest ever so far "M74207281"It is about 1 million digits larger than 22,386,000 8618 digits of.

The following ZIP file contains a text file written "M77232917". The size of the ZIP file is about 11 MB, but the text file has 22.6 MB.

http://www.mersenne.org/primes/digits/M77232917.zip


"M77232917" was discovered by Jonathan Pace's computer participating as a volunteer at GIMPS on December 26, 2017. Mr. Pace is a 51-year-old electrician living in Germantown, Tennessee and has cooperated with the GIMPS project for 14 years. In this discovery, Mr. Pace will be awarded the GIMPS research discovery award for 3000 dollars (about 340,000 yen).

For proof that it is a prime,Intel i5-6600For PCs equipped with processors, it is necessary to continue the calculation for non-stop for 6 days. This time, independent verification was done using four different programs on four different hardware configurations.

GIMPS is an organization formed by George Ultman in 1996 to find new prime numbers,Software released on official websiteAnyone can participate in exploring prime numbers. Since November 1996 Joel Ammergard has found the 35 th Mersenne prime, it continues to discover 16 Mersenne primes up to this 50 th Mersenne prime.