The Largest prime number, with over 2 million digits, was found on a Michigan State student's PC. Just shows you what PCs can do now days!

 

Read the article now:

Largest Prime Number Found (Updated Link)

Ok that link is not working for me and how about looking at Mersenne Primes, as if you discover the next you get $10000. I did a post about them cant quite remember the post name maybe formula???

I dread to think how long it took to confirm that number was prime.

 

I don't really see the point in it anyway to be honest, there's a lot of prime numbers about It's like finding pi to x trillion digits, completely pointless.

And that is not the larget prime, because the latest Mersenne prime is at over 6million digits...i would research if i was you. try http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm

I don't get why someone would pay $10k to find another Mersenne prime. Seems a bit of a waste of money to me.

Hmm...

Try this link:

New Link

 

Edit: The link is working now. You can go to the article from above or my first post. Enjoy!

I think you two are talking about the same number from a cursary glance of the article

We are. I misread the article. It is 6,xxx,xxx digits which is 2 MILLION digits longer than the previous known prime number.

Its over two million digits larger than the previous not over two million digits, hence 6million digits and its a Mersenne Prime. And you get $10K for that, i did some research into Mersenne its intresting all about exponent, obviously Dave would not find it intresting lol.

I hate number theory generally because of my absolutely awful Foundations course at university this term

Awful isnt good!

dave:

Then your in the wrong forum! (The Math Forum that is)

Nah, I love mathematics, it's just this term's been awful as far as work goes. I wouldn't be here if I didn't like maths

You can see clearly (blatancy) that Dave has enthusiasm towards mathematics. I hope you do well Dave you should!

Finding pi to the x trillonth digit is useless, you say?

 

Why?

 

My goal in life is to prove that pi does indeed end! I just have to remember how you get pi in the first place lol.

Bit pointless if it's an irrational number

And just incase you don't know what an irrational number is its a number that cannot be expressed as a fraction for any integers p and q.

(a fraction p/q)

dave:

Very True!

 

Man build computers to help them and then uses them to do stupid things like finding the largest prime number...

Rasori said in post #15 :

Finding pi to the x trillonth digit is useless, you say?

 

Why?

 

My goal in life is to prove that pi does indeed end! I just have to remember how you get pi in the first place lol.

 

oh pi is irrational and does not end. that is provable, just like sqrt(2) does not end, and provably so. this is a lovely little proof, so I hope you don't mind if I indulge myself, it is a proof by contradiction

 

assume that sqrt2 is rational, then it can be represented by a fraction n/m: where n and m have no common factors (or we can just cancel them out)

 

sqrt2=n/m

 

now square both sides and move m over to the other side

 

2m^2 = n^2

 

now since the number on the left is even, the number on the right must be even also. we know that the square of an odd number is in itself an odd number, so this means that n must be even, and hence can be divided by two, or represented as 2 multiplied by an odd number, let us call this number k:

 

n=2k

 

and substitute:

 

2m^2 = (2k)^2 = 4k^2

 

now we have m^2=2k^2

 

which means than m must be even. however this cannot be the case, since we already pointed out that n and m have no common factor, because if they did, we could just cancel this factor out. but from this result we can see than n and m must be even (i.e. they have a common factor of 2). this is a contradiction, so the original premise that

 

sqrt2 = n/m must be false. and so sqrt2 is not a rational number QED.

The proof that pi is irrational is probably best expressed as coming from the MacLaurin series, but that would require too much explanation.

nice proof rad ed. I did that in math last year too

 

What does QED mean though?

At the end of your post.

Quad Erat Demonstrandum

 

Basically, 'As I have shown' (it's an example of gerundival attraction in actual fact, so means something more complicated, but that translation will do)

I did foundations of pure mathematics module and currently doing doing MAthematical Structures Module. Its terrible. really hard. doing cyclic groups and integer arithmetic and am completely baffeled.

I received a newsletter from Mresenne a few months ago that stated:

 

On November 17th GIMPS member Michael Shafer at Michigan State

University proved 2^20996011-1 prime. At over 6.3 million digits it is

easily the largest known prime number, beating GIMPS' 2 year old

record of just over 4 million digits.