Attention math geeks! A new largest Prime Number found!

[upsciLLion]

Originally posted by: silverpig

Originally posted by: ReiAyanami
with quantum computing 10 years from now, we'll finally be able to find the very last prime number...

There are infinitely many primes...

Proposition:

Prime numbers are more than any assigned multitude of prime numbers.

Proof:

Let there be only a finite number of primes: p1,p2,...,pn. We are then able to form a number M = p1p2...pn equal to the product of all existent prime numbers. M is clearly divisible by any of the existent primes pi.

Let N = M + 1. Whatever divisors N may have none of them may be among the divisors of M. Consider N's prime factors. From the previous discussion none of them may coincide with any of p1,p2,...,pn. This contradicts the assumption that the number of primes is finite.

I believe the underlying logic for that proof belongs to Euclid.

ups

 

[Indolent]

Originally posted by: Mak0602
bah wasted 8 years of his life IMO

Or 19 days?

 

[Muzzan]

I once found the largest prime, but I didn't have enough space in the margin of my notebook to write it down.

 

[maziwanka]

score for math (my 1000th post).

 

[Snapster]

Originally posted by: maziwanka
score for math (my 1000th post).

For that shameless nef, you have to find out the 1000th Marsenne prime!

 

[Ninjja]

Originally posted by: maziwanka
score for math (my 1000th post).

YAY!! CONGRATULATIONS TO MAZIWANKA FOR HIS 1000th POST!!!!!!!!!


HURRAH!! HURRAH!!

 

[UNCjigga]

So now that he found it, what can he do with it? Call me an ignorant liberal arts major (that I am!) but I'll file this under the 'Useless Discovery of the Year" category...

 

[Descartes]

Originally posted by: rgwalt
At first, I thought he was doing his own prime search and got very, very lucky. I didn't realize it was part of a distributed computing project. I'm sitting here, scratching my head wondering why a chemical engineer would want to search for primes...

R

There are plenty of chem engineers that are geeks as well.

 

[Balt]

Hard to believe a number that high is only divisible by one and itself.

Blows my mind.

 

[Avatar26]

yay
**yawn**

 

[DrPizza]

Originally posted by: uncJIGGA
So now that he found it, what can he do with it? Call me an ignorant liberal arts major (that I am!) but I'll file this under the 'Useless Discovery of the Year" category...

prime numbers are very useful in encryption (cryptography)... the bigger the prime, the harder to break the encryption. A lot of encryption relies on multiplying prime numbers together. As should be obvious, given that this was a distributed computing problem, finding factors of HUGE numbers is difficult. But, it's easy to multiply a couple of prime numbers together... and if you know what one of the prime numbers is, it's easy to divide that product by one of the prime numbers to get the other number.

Example, if I want to encode a 16 digit bank number (which is also a prime number to make this a simple example), I could multiply it by a 100 digit prime number (and get some number with about 116 digits in it).

All you have to do is figure out what number to divide by. so, you could start by 2. Nope. Then divide by 3. Nope. Then divide by 4. Nope. Then 5.... etc.

Sounds like a great job for a computer... just keep dividing by the next number, until something works. Suppose you computer can do 1 Million of these calculations every second. A 16 digit number, by dividing in this manner, would take between 10 billion and 99.999 billion seconds to find. That's between 317 years and 3171 years to find. Of course, by that time, we'll have faster computers. Thus the hunt for bigger prime numbers. Actual encryption is more complicated than that, making it much much harder to decrypt. Using brute force (trying every combination) just isn't reasonable given the speed of todays computers.

If that sounds even remotely interesting, ditch the McDonald's track liberal arts degree and major in some hard core math or science area.