A 36-year-old man, who previously worked as a programmer for Nvidia, spent almost a year of his life and invested a considerable amount of money to discover the world’s largest known prime number.
Officially named ‘M136279841’, Luke Durant’s discovery contains 41,024,320 points, marking the first major breakthrough in nearly six years, CNN reports.
A prime number is a whole number that can only be divided by 1 or itself, such as 2, 3, 5, 7, etc.
Located in San Jose, California, Luc Durant’s landmark discovery is classified as a Mersenne Prime, named after the French monk Marin Mersenne. He studied these numbers 350 years ago.
According to the report, Mersenne primes are rare, which makes Durant’s discovery even more impressive. In simple words, for a number to be considered a Mersenne prime it has to be written as ‘2ᵖ-1’.
While other large prime numbers are used in some applications to protect Internet security, Mersenne primes remain important for other major reasons.
“The historical record of the world’s largest primes tells us something about the historical potential of computers, and in particular what it tells us about humanity’s progress in this area,” CNN quoted Dr. Kevin Buzzard, professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College, as saying. Tells something about.” London, as the saying goes.
Mr Durant’s research was announced on October 21 by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a community-based project.
An example of citizen science, GIMPS allows non-experts to discover the largest known prime numbers, according to Buzzard “I recognized that the GIMPS community has created an incredible system with amazing technology for discovering huge prime numbers ,” Mr. Durant said.
For this project, Luke Durant first familiarized himself with its software and learned how to use the cloud computer. Later, they combined these elements to create incredibly fast supercomputers capable of running large enough worldwide systems.
People from different cities around the world volunteer in the GIMPS community as they run the project’s software on their personal computer systems to search for new primes.
Luke Durant was inspired to discover the world’s largest primes by his interest in developing large computing systems as well as exploring the limits of the laws of physics. Through his endeavor, he wanted to “push the boundaries of the known universe in whatever small way I was able to”.
He said, “These huge prime numbers are, in some sense, the largest ‘unique pieces of information’ in the known universe.”
