Useless info, but it may be interesting for some... 8)

"On February 18, 2005, Dr. Martin Nowak from Germany, found the new largest known prime number, 225,964,951-1. The prime number has 7,816,230 digits! It took more than 50 days of calculations on Dr. Nowak's 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 computer. The new prime was independently verified in 5 days by Tony Reix of Grenoble, France using a 16 Itanium CPU Bull NovaScale 5000 HPC running the Glucas program by Guillermo Ballester Valor of Granada, Spain. A second verification was completed by Jeff Gilchrist of Elytra Enterprises Inc. in Ottawa, Canada using 15 days of time on 12 CPUs of a Compaq Alpha GS160 1.2 GHz CPU server at SHARCNET. "

Here's the number by the way:
http://www.mersenne.org/prime8.txt
Warning: do not open it if you're on Dial-up (unless you have a LOT of spare time available..)
The file (containing only one number!) is over 8mb...


Looks like someone's got WAY too much spare time..

I heard that there was a Prime Number that large, but I didn't think that it would have that many digits. I wonder when they'll discover the next one...

Ummm, how do you pronounce that?

It's also well known as your odds in the lottery.

oh my god.

I thought that thing was huge, then I noticed that my computer had only finnished downloading less than 1/2 of the number

i wish i had that much money....lol

at least they realised they found it, when a distributed computing group tried to break 64bit encryption they broke it, but didn't find the notice that said they did it for a good two weeks because there were so many "nope, this aint it" messages on their system

I thought it was the chances of a guy hearing a female who whispers.

please tell me that was not government funding?

and some girls arent loud, ya know, you just wouldnt know because you cant hear them.

Mathematicians hear a different drummer than most of us.