Professors discover new prime number
Elizabeth Ellis: Muleskinner
Issue date: 3/4/10 Section: News
On the south wall of the Union Atrium, a large poster hangs-almost 15 feet long. At first glance, it merely looks like a gray blur, but it's actually a number-one of the largest known Mersenne prime numbers, with more than 9.8 million digits.
This monstrous number was discovered by Curtis Cooper, computer and mathematics professor, and Steve Boone, associate dean of the College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, in late 2006 as part of the worldwide search for a Mersenne prime number of more than 10 million digits. The year before, they found a Mersenne number with 9.1 million digits.
Cooper and Boone were awarded a $6,665 prize for their finds this year, after the search for a Mersenne number of more than 10 million digits was completed. The winner of the $50,000 grand prize was UCLA. Their Mersenne prime number had 12.9 million digits.
"I'm not in it for the money," Cooper said. "That's the farthest thing from my mind. Our names and UCM's name will be in textbooks for years to come. It's good positive publicity for the school."
A prime number is one that can only be divided by itself and one. A Mersenne prime number is two to the power of a prime number, minus one. If the answer is prime, then the exponent you used is a Mersenne prime number.
However, the numbers that Cooper and Boone were using were much larger than two or three. Most of the numbers they are testing now have anywhere from 28 to 50 million digits.
"The definition of Mersenne prime is really pretty simple," Cooper said. "A lot of people can understand it, but when you get to numbers around this size, it becomes incomprehensible."
Because Mersenne numbers are so large, Cooper and Boone use a computer program to do all of the number-crunching for them. The program they use is distributed free through the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project.
The program is a distributing computer project-single computers are all put on a network to work on a larger problem.
This monstrous number was discovered by Curtis Cooper, computer and mathematics professor, and Steve Boone, associate dean of the College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, in late 2006 as part of the worldwide search for a Mersenne prime number of more than 10 million digits. The year before, they found a Mersenne number with 9.1 million digits.
Cooper and Boone were awarded a $6,665 prize for their finds this year, after the search for a Mersenne number of more than 10 million digits was completed. The winner of the $50,000 grand prize was UCLA. Their Mersenne prime number had 12.9 million digits.
"I'm not in it for the money," Cooper said. "That's the farthest thing from my mind. Our names and UCM's name will be in textbooks for years to come. It's good positive publicity for the school."
A prime number is one that can only be divided by itself and one. A Mersenne prime number is two to the power of a prime number, minus one. If the answer is prime, then the exponent you used is a Mersenne prime number.
However, the numbers that Cooper and Boone were using were much larger than two or three. Most of the numbers they are testing now have anywhere from 28 to 50 million digits.
"The definition of Mersenne prime is really pretty simple," Cooper said. "A lot of people can understand it, but when you get to numbers around this size, it becomes incomprehensible."
Because Mersenne numbers are so large, Cooper and Boone use a computer program to do all of the number-crunching for them. The program they use is distributed free through the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project.
The program is a distributing computer project-single computers are all put on a network to work on a larger problem.
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