[extropy-chat] new record prime!

[Spike]

Woooohooooo!

Michael Shafer discovered the 40th known Mersenne prime, 
2^20996011-1.

This prime is over 6.3 million digits, beating the 
previous world record prime by over 2 million decimal digits.

Scott has handed out the press release and already the 
first online article of the discovery has appeared:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994438

You can also read Scott's press release
http://www.mersenne.org/20996011.htm

The size of the record largest known prime is about 2^7529000
times larger than the previous record which was set about two
years ago, so the size of the record largest prime doubled
about every 8.4 seconds on the average, which is itself a
record.

The previous records were set on the dates shown in the
table below, along with the number of seconds for each
doubling.  So you can see the doubling time is shorter
than ever:

Record set on:		Doubling time in seconds:

01-Jul-94			614.8
03-Sep-96			172.4
13-Nov-96			43.7
24-Aug-97			15.6
27-Jan-98			298.5
01-Jun-99			10.7
14-Nov-01			11.9
17-Nov-03			8.4

Ohhhh, this is waaay cool.  Who wants to have a party?
There are several other math types in the area who
will go and party our brains out at such a happy
occasion.

{8^]

spike