Tuesday, June 16, 2009

A New Prime Number

Math is in the news today!

A new prime number has been discovered by Odd Magnar Strindmo from Melhus, Norway. It is 13 million digits long, so I won't display it here. It is a Mersenne prime number which means it can be calculated from the equation:



where n is a prime number.

The calculation required a lot of computing power (because the values for n are so large) and was aided by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). People can download software onto their personal computers to help with the calculations.

4 comments:

Jacqui said...

It's so good to have someone else around the math-less kidlit world who finds these things SO COOL!

Ann Finkelstein said...

Two scientist friends wondered aloud about the use of a new prime number. I explained that I needed a math-related post on my blog.

Nathan said...

Dude I'm so glad this happened

Nathan said...

Dude I'm so glad this happened