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New Largest Prime Number

Nemo

Greetings fellow troubled souls,

Apropos nothing at all...

The largest known prime number has been discovered by an amateur researcher and former Nvidia employee.

The new number is 2136,279,841 – 1, which beats the previous title holder (282,589,933 – 1) by more than 16 million digits.

Think about that for a minute..

23 = 8

210 = 1024

2100 = 1267650600228230000000000000000.

The last one contains 31 digits.

Now consider 2136,279,841

The newly confirmed prime number contains 41,024,320 decimal digits! Yes, 41,024,320 decimal digits.

I'll get my anorak.

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  • in reply to TheCatWoman
    TheCatWoman said:
    Will it change the world?

    The principle of the laser dates back to 1917, when Albert Einstein first described the theory of stimulated emission. The technology further evolved in May 1960 when the very first laser was built at Hughes Research Laboratories.

    The first CO2 laser, developed in 1964, had a power output of only one milliwatt (0.001 watt). By 1967, CO2 lasers with power exceeding 1,000 watts were possible - an increase by a factor of one million. The first commercial application of Laser Materials Processing was in May of 1967 when Peter Houldcroft of TWI (The Welding Institute) in Cambridge, England used an oxygen-assisted CO2 laser beam to cut through a sheet of steel 1 mm thick.

    The rest is history. The laser is now ubiquitous.

  • in reply to TheCatWoman

    As for the usefulness of the discovery, "At present there are few practical uses for these large Mersenne primes, prompting some to ask, 'Why search for these large primes?" the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search team wrote in the statement. "Those same doubts existed a few decades ago until important cryptography algorithms were developed based on prime numbers."