Obscure Research Blog September Archive

Main stream news reports new record prime number, with no details.

The Main Stream News is reporting today that a new record prime number has been found. In their typical style, the reports lacks any meaningful detail.

The new number was actually found last month. Edson Smith, Computing Resource Manager for the UCLA Department of Mathematics summarizes the achievement here, and gives the details here.

"The UCLA Mersenne Prime number is 243112609 - 1. The actual number has 12,978,189 digits. If you're so inclined, long-time Mersenne Prime researcher Landon Curt Noll has made the number itself available here. If you're really, really inclined, he also provides the entire number in English (all 328 megabytes of it) here."