Student Finds Largest Prime Number Yet : 2^20996011-1
Mathematics Thursday, December 11, 2003 . This is a SciScoop post by Ricky James
Shafer used a free software program as part of an international grid of 211,000 networked computers in virtually every time zone of the world.
“I had just finished a meeting with my adviser when I saw the computer had found the new prime,” he said. “After a short victory dance, I called up my wife and friends involved with GIMPS to share the great news!”
He used a 2 GHz Pentium 4 Dell Dimension PC running for 19 days to prove the number prime. “The software runs great without affecting the computer,” Shafer said. “I get my work done and contribute to the project at the same time.”
Shafer’s discovery was made Nov. 17, but it was not independently verified until this week.
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2 Responses to Student Finds Largest Prime Number Yet : 2^20996011-1
Drog
December 11th, 2003 at 9:19 am
I used to run that distributed computing program years ago, looking for prime numbers. Then I switched to SETI@home (I’ve processed 9122 data units so far!) because I thought the potential gain, if successful, was much greater. Does anyone know if there is a practical use for finding more primes? Are we hoping that finding more of them would lead to the eventual development of a theory for predicting which numbers are prime directly without having to check each number individually, which in turn could be used to advance other aspects of our mathematics knowledge?
Anonymous
December 11th, 2003 at 8:37 pm
The most prevalent use of large primes that I know it in public-key encryption. The idea is that each key is basically a really large prime number. One key are used to create a composite number that can only be factored by the other key. You can only decrypt the message if you know one of the primes.
The problem is that it’s hard to quickly find and verify very large primes, so most encryption packages use pseudo-primes, i.e. numbers that are “probably” prime. If by chance they are not, then a third party can decrypt messages encrypted with the non-prime pseudo-prime.
So, to (finally) answer your question, yes. It would be a great benefit, to those relying on encrypted communications, to be able quickly prove that a number is prime or not and to be able to quickly generate large primes.
Sorry if that’s not clear, it’s been too long since I studied cryptography.
PerlStalker