Haswell Core i5 user discovers largest prime number ever

[HEXUS]

This Mersenne prime number, dubbed M82589933, is nearly 25 million digits in length.

Read more.

[Corky34]

Now we just need to workout what to do with it.

[Hoonigan]

That's my thinking as well Corky. It's all well and good finding these prime numbers, but why do we need to know what they are?

[Tabbykatze]

I think you should have copy pasted the whole number into the article in a pop out quote if people want to see it

[Mblaster]

I think you should have copy pasted the whole number into the article in a pop out quote if people want to see it

That might slow down the page load time a bit, just a pure text file of that number would be around 24MB

[Tabbykatze]

That might slow down the page load time a bit, just a pure text file of that number would be around 24MB

I want to break browsers!

[nibbi]

nice

[MrJim]

Now we just need to workout what to do with it.

Large prime numbers are very useful for encryption, amongst other things:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/...-works/9338876

[Corky34]

True, but this is a Mersenne prime number, not that I'm clever enough to know, or even understand, the difference between the two.

And before anyone tries explaining it to me, i read the explanation in the article but it made about much sense to me as when i tried to understand quantum physics so it's probably best to just accept that it's beyond my comprehension.

[DanceswithUnix]

Large prime numbers are very useful for encryption, amongst other things:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/...-works/9338876

For prime numbers to work with encryption they have to be secret, not plastered on a Wikipedia page

Actually that isn't quite true, public keys use simple known primes but choose numbers that in binary have as few '1' bits as possible. That makes Mersenne primes worst case, for each set bit you need to perform an operation. You usually use 2^16+1 as a public prime.

[Crevan]

the prime number is one less than another number to the power of two

Wrong wording here, Mike. "X to the power of two" is X^2. Mersenne numbers are (2^X)-1. You'd have to say "the prime number is one less than two to the power of another number".