Big Primes, Small Numbers, Sarah Palin and the Financial Crisis -- ABC NewsMathematics Figures in Recent News Stories
This month's "Who's Counting" will be an assortment drawn from mathematically flavored stories in the news.
A 13-Million-Digit Prime Number
The first concerns a number that easily swamps even the billions and trillions cited in recent financial stories. We know a lot about the existence of millions of subprime mortgages, but little media attention has been devoted to the existence of a just-discovered 13-million digit prime number. (A prime number, recall, is one divisible only by itself and 1. The numbers 3, 19 and 37 are prime, whereas 6, 33 and 49 are not.)
Mathematicians at UCLA won the $100,000 prize offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for discovering this humongously large prime number. It is a Mersenne prime number, a prime number of the form 2^P-1, where P is also prime. In this case P = 43,112,609, and the 13-million digit number is 2^43,112,609 - 1.
Read more ....
No comments:
Post a Comment