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Sought-after prime number is found

LOS ANGELES: A group of mathematicians at University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) has discovered a 13-million-digit prime number, making them eligible for a $100,000 prize from an activist group supporting individual rights on the Web.

The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a computer running Windows XP. The number was verified by a different computer system running a different algorithm.

“We’re delighted,” said UCLA’s Edson Smith, leader of the effort. “Now we’re looking for the next one, despite the odds,” which are thought to be about one in 150,000 that any number tested will be a Mersenne prime.

Mersenne primes, named after the French mathematician Marin Mersenne, who discovered them, take the form 2^P - 1, where P is also a prime number. The new prime is P=43,112,609.

Thousands of people around the world have been participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, in which underused computing power is harnessed to perform calculations needed to find and verify Mersenne primes.

The $100,000 prize is being offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for finding the first Mersenne prime with more than 10 million digits. The prize could be awarded when the new prime is published, probably next year. — AP

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