Largest prime number ever
December 11, 2003Kinda neat–a project harnessing the power of thousands of computers across the Internet to build a virtual super computer has found the largest prime number. It’s a Mersenne prime, 2 to the 20,996,011th power minus 1. Mersenne means the power– 20,996,011 –is also a prime number.
Not gonna change the world but it’s still cool. Maybe there’s hope for some of the other shared-computing projects, like the SETI one, to achieve something significant.
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