Mathematics Weblog

New Mersenne Prime

It’s not often that one can report mathematics news but two weeks ago a new Mersenne prime was discovered. A Mersenne prime is a prime number of the form ie one less than a power of two. It is easy to show that itself must also be prime. The new prime number is has 7,235,733 decimal digits and was found on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 computer running Windows XP.

You can help search for larger primes and possibly win $100,000 for discovering the first 10-million-digit prime. See the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS)