UCLA group discovers humungous prime number

I know we at BN are about the athletics, but big ups over to the academic side too.

over 3 years ago HE HATE ME 15 comments 0 recs |

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Very impressive

I know enough about math to know it’s extremely difficult to express prime numbers that are that large —13 million digits is a huge number.

Wow.

by gilbert on Sep 28, 2008 6:05 PM PDT reply actions

Those crazy people from Boelter Hall/M&S building :-)

by Nestor on Sep 28, 2008 6:51 PM PDT reply actions

Interestingly

that number also represents the precise number of trOJan athletes who have been involved in NCAA violations and criminal infractions in the last 10 years.

greg in denver

by gbruin on Sep 28, 2008 10:15 PM PDT reply actions

LMAO

Hilarious!!!

by uclafan11 on Sep 29, 2008 12:41 AM PDT up reply actions

A-Ha!

…They were finally able to nail that down. Although, since that number continues to increase at an alarming, exponential rate…they will have to find the next Prime as quickly as possible.

Love My Bruins

by Bruingirl83 on Sep 29, 2008 9:48 AM PDT up reply actions

I saw this in the news

I can imagine the guys sitting around the break room talking about prime numbers and thinking how wimp something like 5 or 17 is. Let’s find something 13 million digits long.

Now, I’m not saying I don’t believe our guys. I do believe them. But if this news had come out of justsc, I would have asked them to show me this number written out in long hand, and then just to be sure, I would want them to divide it by 6 or something like that.

I guess that’s another question – how would you go about proving that little item? And I would like to ask our engineering guys to tell us whether it’s exactly 13 million digits or is it 13 million and a little bit more?

by Fox 71 on Sep 29, 2008 5:55 PM PDT reply actions

Finding prime numbers

Since there is no “formula” for prime numbers, basically the competition is: how good is your algorithm and how good of a computer can you run it on?

One example (more for visualization than an actual algorithm) could be:

[02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, …, n]
first number = prime number #1 (2).
remove all multiples
[xx, 03, xx, 05, xx, 07, xx, 09, xx, 11, xx, 13, …, n]
second number = prime number #2 (3)
remove all multiples
[xx, xx, xx, 05, xx, 07, xx, 09, xx, 11, xx, 13, …, n]
third number = prime number #3 (5)
remove all multiples
…

etc. etc.

So in order to find the next highest prime, you only need to check that the number isn’t divisible by the current list of primes (as opposed to checking that it isn’t divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, …).

The number that they found is 2^(43,112,609) − 1. We should be thankful that the number is a Mersenne prime so it is easy to write out on this board =).

by dokein on Sep 30, 2008 1:32 AM PDT up reply actions