prime number

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After 14 Years, FedEx Employee Makes Major Math Discovery

There's a new longest known prime number

(Newser) - A new prime number—the biggest ever—has been discovered. Unfortunately, we don't have the 54 days CNET reports it would take to write it all out. The newly found number, nicknamed M77232917, is 2 to the 77,232,917th power minus 1, according to FiveThirtyEight . It's 23,...

Man Being Hailed as Real 'Good Will Hunting'
 Man Being Hailed as 
 Real 'Good Will Hunting' 
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Jul 23, 2016 12:19 PM CDT

Man Being Hailed as Real 'Good Will Hunting'

Yu Jianchun has come up with alternate method of verifying Carmichael numbers

(Newser) - Yu Jianchun has never seen Good Will Hunting, and maybe he doesn't need to. CNN reports the 33-year-old Chinese migrant worker is living part of its plot. Yu attended a vocational school rather than college, and he's never taken advanced math—"I barely have any knowledge about...

Prime Numbers Just Got a Little Stranger

They repeat in patterns that aren't as random as thought

(Newser) - Two Stanford mathematicians have managed to surprise others in their field with a previously undiscovered insight about prime numbers: They're not as random as believed. Or, more precisely, there seems to be some order in the way one prime number follows another, reports Quanta Magazine . Start with the basics:...

Behold the Biggest Prime Number Ever—All 22M Digits

It was discovered on a computer that went in for routine maintenance

(Newser) - The longest prime number ever found has been discovered by a computer in Missouri, and it's a doozy: 274,207,281–1 has 22,338,618 digits, the Guardian reports. The number also known as M74207281 was found by a computer tied to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search...

Mathematicians Make Leap in Solving Age-Old Proof

Theory on infinite pairs of 'twin primes' closer to resolution

(Newser) - If you're the type to get into bar bets about prime numbers, we have exciting news. Mathematicians have taken a big step toward solving one of the oldest math problems on record, one involving "twin primes," reports Nature . The upshot is that they're closer to stating...

Big Discovery: Largest Prime Number

Newest Mersenne 'like finding a diamond'

(Newser) - The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search just paid dividends in the hunt for ever-bigger prime numbers, the New Scientist reports. University of Central Missouri mathematician Curtis Cooper has discovered the biggest prime number yet, a 17 million-digit behemoth, as part of GIMPS. The project uses a huge network of volunteer...

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