University of California-Los Angeles mathematicians appear to have won a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for discovering a 13-million-digit prime number that has long been sought by computer users.
Bragging rights for discovering the 46th known Mersenne prime are huge.
“We’re delighted,” said UCLA’s Edson Smith, leader of the effort. “Now we’re looking for the next one, despite the odds.”
It is thought to be about one in 150,000 that any number tested will be a Mersenne prime.
Prime numbers are those, such as three, seven and 11, that are divisible only by themselves and one. Mersenne primes, named after the 17th century French mathematician Marin Mersenne, who discovered them, take the form 2P – 1, where P also is a prime number.
In the new UCLA prime, P is 43,112,609.
Thousands of people around the world have been participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, in which underused computing power is harnessed to perform the complex and tedious calculations needed to find and verify Mersenne primes.
The new Mersenne prime was discovered Aug. 23 on a Dell Optiplex 745 running Windows XP.
