“The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) celebrated its 20th anniversary with the math discovery of the new largest known prime number, 2^74,207,281-1, having 22,338,618 digits, on a university computer volunteered by Curtis Cooper for the project. The same GIMPS software just uncovered a flaw in Intel’s latest Skylake CPUs, and its global network of CPUs peaking at 450 trillion calculations per second remains the longest continuously-running ‘grassroots supercomputing’ project in Internet history. The new prime number, also known as M74207281, is calculated by multiplying together 74,207,281 twos then subtracting one. It is almost 5 million digits larger than the previous record prime number, in a special class of extremely rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes. It is only the 49th known Mersenne prime ever discovered, each increasingly difficult to find. Mersenne primes were named for the French monk Marin Mersenne, who studied these numbers more than 350 years ago. GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered all 15 of the largest known Mersenne primes. Volunteers download a free program to search for these primes with a cash award offered to anyone lucky enough to compute a new prime. Prof. Chris Caldwell maintains an authoritative web site on the largest known primes and is an excellent history of Mersenne primes.”
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