We should all remember the concept of prime numbers, so do you know Marin Mersenne?
This was proposed by the French mathematician Malan Mason in 1644, referring to the prime numbers that can be expressed in the form of 2n-1, the smallest one is 3, then 7, 31, 127 ... As to whether there are an infinite number of Mersenne primes, How to distribute it has always been a super puzzle in the history of mathematics.
Prior to this, a total of 49 Mersenne primes were found, and from 1997 to the present, all new Mersenne primes were discovered by the Internet's Mason Large Number Search (GIMPS) distributed computing project, which has been found 15 consecutively.
Confirmed, on December 26, 2017, Jonathan Pac, a 51-year-old federal courier in Tennessee and former electrical engineer, discovered The 50th Mason prime has a value of two77232917-1, which is 2 minus 77232917 times 1.
It's a 23,249,525 digit number, nearly one million more than the 49th Mason prime number found in January 2016. It can be filled with 9,000 pages of paper, 1-inch (2.54 cm) long for 1 second and 54 days for continuous writing, The entire number is 37 miles (59.5 kilometers), 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) longer than the 49th.
Jonathan Pac has joined the GIMPS program to find Mersenne primes for more than 14 years, This time using their own one Core i5-6600 computer, running for six days, only to get this major discovery , Validated by four individuals using four different algorithms on five different platforms:
- Aaron blosser, Intel Xeon server, Prime95, 37 hours.
- David Stanfill, AMD RX Vega 64 Graphics, gpuOwL, 34 hours.
- Andreas Hoglund, NVIDIA Titan Black Graphics, CUDALucas, 73 hours; Amazon AWS, Mlucas, 65 hours.
- Ernst Mayer, 32-core Xeon server, Mlucas, 82 hours.
Jonathan Pac won the $ 30,000 prize, and if anyone first finds the first Mersenne prime in excess of 100 million, it will receive $ 150,000 in prize money, $ 250,000 in prize money of $ 1 billion!
Interested can go to Mersenne.org download tool to participate.
