Prime Time With Curtis Cooper

The big news in pure mathematics yesterday was the discovery (actually on January 25, by Dr. Curtis Cooper of Missouri) of the largest prime number yet, with well over 17 million digits... probably too long to use for your Facebook password (amazingly, this number has almost 4.5 million more digits than the last previous largest prime and is the third time Dr. Cooper has been a finder!):

http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/mathematicians-discover-a-monster-prime-17-million-digits/

It's always newsworthy when these largest primes are found, even if it doesn't affect our day-to-day lives anytime soon (…if the price of that next cup of Starbucks coffee goes up, well, it's strictly a coincidence… I think). Primes are the "stuff" (atoms as it were) of mathematics, and go on forever.

This latest prime was found by way of the GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) project, a collaboration of volunteers all across the internet (yes, YOU too can take part) -- a GREAT example of the kind of group-efforts the internet has made possible, and mathematicians have been at the forefront of. If you're not already familiar with it, read about the project at Wikipedia here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_Search

...or at the home site for the project here:

http://www.mersenne.org/

As long as I'm talking prime numbers, might as well go ahead and re-plug a book I love, "The Mystery of the Prime Numbers" by Matthew Watkins. Because it's from Britain and self-published it is not well distributed, but is available through Amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Prime-Numbers-Secrets-Creation/dp/0956487904

I believe anyone from bright teenagers to dull mathematicians... er, no, I mean adult mathematicians ;-)... can enjoy and learn some things from this intriguing volume on a subject of eternal interest (and it's actually the first volume in a "trilogy" by the author).

Thursday Math Miscellany

1) Sol Lederman's new site for "playing" with Wolfram Mathematica is now up-and-running, and looks gooood! ...but then that would be expected from Sol!!:

http://playingwithmathematica.com/

2) SquareCircleZ blog offers a list of 10 free-for-the-asking help sites for math questions:

http://www.squarecirclez.com/blog/top-10-math-help-sites/5966

3) Finally, Jason Rosenhouse astutely explained Mersenne primes in this recent post:

http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2011/04/monday_math_mersenne_primes.php#more

Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS)

For anyone who doesn't already know of it, the GIMPS project links up computers worldwide to search for the next Mersenne Prime number (of the form 2^n - 1) --- anyone with a personal computer can participate, and even win cash rewards (and all the work is done on your computer in the background, while you wile away the hours surfing the Web and eating pizza!).

If interested check it out here:

http://www.mersenne.org/

Some history/background on Mersenne primes:

http://primes.utm.edu/mersenne/index.html

or the Wikipedia account:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_prime

...and more updated info on primes here:

http://primes.utm.edu/largest.html

Finally, the largest current Mersenne prime (at the moment):  2^43112609 -1