from Hacker News

GIMPS Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number

by seycombi on 1/3/18, 7:01 PM with 108 comments

• by imhelpingu on 1/3/18, 8:02 PM

  So that's what it's working on when it's starting up.

• by cjbprime on 1/3/18, 8:03 PM

  > Jonathan Pace is a 51-year old Electrical Engineer living in Germantown, Tennessee. Perseverance has finally paid off for Jon - he has been hunting for big primes with GIMPS for over 14 years.

  What a great story.

• by netcraft on 1/3/18, 8:24 PM

  so I didn't know this, but got curious about how many known prime there are - I knew there were infinite primes, but thought that there would be some concrete list of all the primes that we had discovered somewhere - but apparently not

  https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/272791/how-many-pri...

  > Nobody's really keeping count. ... There are very many hundred-digit primes to find. We could cover the Earth in harddisks full of distinct hundred-digit primes to a height of hundreds of meters, without even making a dent in the supply of hundred-digit primes.

• by jcoffland on 1/3/18, 7:52 PM

  tl;dr The 50th Mersenne prime was just found by a volunteer of the GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) project. It is 2^77,232,917-1 and has 23,249,425 digits. Mersenne primes are extremely rare and are always of the form 2^p-1 for some positive integer p. The first four Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31, and 127.

• by WhitneyLand on 1/3/18, 9:59 PM

  But why?

  One answer is a bit buried in a sub link in the article. On that page, you’ll find arguments for the following reasons: tradition, by products of the quest, collection of rare mathematical things, glory, pushing hardware performance, and contest rewards.

  Personally I’m forced to admit I enjoy seeing them found while being unable to form any cogent justification.

  http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html

• by dghughes on 1/3/18, 9:31 PM

  Prime numbers are amazing.

  I was watching a math documentary and one example was a Cicada in North Carolina that only emerges once every thirteen years millions of them at once. It's a defense mechanism the sheer number overwhelms predators. The Cicada does this also to avoid appearing when another species of Cicada appears to prevent cross breeding.

  The other species in the same region emerges every 7 years. The two will only emerge at the same time every 220 years (I think it as).

  Smart bugs!

• by votepaunchy on 1/3/18, 7:58 PM

  January looks to be a good month for discovering large prime numbers! As a former contributor to the project it would be great to have a primer on the best way to contribute today, covering the options for CPUs vs GPUs and the various projects for factorizations vs primality tests.

• by jbgreer on 1/3/18, 10:33 PM

  TIL I work at the same company as the discoverer of the 50th known Mersenne Prime.

  I know at least one sysadmin who used GIMPS as a burn-in program for new servers.....

• by ambivalents on 1/3/18, 7:59 PM

  As someone who knows nothing about advanced mathematics, could someone explain why this matters? (i.e. beyond that this is rare and theoretically interesting)

• by masterdev8 on 1/15/18, 5:52 AM

  Is there a web service where you can buy a large number with certain length? Not a Mersenne prime, but just a number and/or a prime?

  It needs to comply with the 2^n-1 formula. Let's say I want a number long 100 000 000 or even 1 000 000 000 long. Or a prime above that length.

  Do you know how much would that cost per number prime and non-prime?

• by sohkamyung on 1/4/18, 4:55 AM

  Curious: can bitcoin mining rigs be modified for BOINC projects (GIMPS, Seti@Home, etc.)? If yes, than I might invest in some rigs and modify them to run BOINC.

  Yes, I'm weird: I prefer to do computation for BOINC than for bitcoin. :-)

• by mwilliaams on 1/3/18, 8:15 PM

  Is there actually any use to discovering ever-larger prime numbers?

• by MPSimmons on 1/3/18, 7:34 PM

  I believe the classic joke goes,

  "Now Bruce Schneier needs to change the code on his luggage"

• by samstave on 1/4/18, 1:03 AM

  I know that humans want to know these things, but can someone ELI5 why this important?

• by madez on 1/3/18, 9:27 PM

  There is rarely a submission here on Hacker News that has comments of such bad quality as this submission has.

  I see a similar phenomenon with press. They "hype" something they barely understand, change parts of the story to make it more interesting, or invent new words (Cyber!). This is a disservice.

  What do you do to avoid this noise?