Named after Marin Mersenne, the 17th century French monk and mathematician who first discovered them, a prime number can only be divided by one and itself. To date, only 46 such Mersenne prime numbers have been found, 8 of which were uncovered by UCLA.
Edson Smith of UCLA told the Associated Press news agency, “We're delighted. Now we're looking for the next one, despite the odds."
Electronic Frontier Foundation Prize
The UCLA team that uncovered the 13 million digit prime are eligible to collect a $100,000 prize funded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The prize was founded to encourage co-operative computing across the internet, harnessing the power of idle computers to solve massively complex equations. The prize was offered to anyone who discovered the first Mersenne prime of more than 10 million digits.
$50,000 of the prize money is expected to go to the UCLA mathematics department. A further $25,000 will be donated to charity, and the remainder of the prize pool will be distributed amongst the discoverers of the six previous Mersenne Prime numbers.
Great Internet Mersenne Prize Searches
The Electronic Frontier Foundation Prize saw the rise of GIMPS - Great Internet Mersenne Prize Searches. In much the same way as the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence program harnessed the distributed computing power of volunteers to search space for radio signals, GIMPS utilize the combined computer power of thousands of machines belonging to participants worldwide to search for high-value Mersenne prime numbers.
The UCLA GIMP search that was used to discover the new prime number used a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. Their discovery was checked by a separate computer system that verified the findings.
Previous Mersenne Prime Discoveries
While this newest Mersenne prime has only just been announced following independent verification by Sun Microsystems, the number was actually computed on August 23rd of this year. On 6th September, Hans-Michael Elvenich of Langenfeld, Germany, discovered an 11 million digit Mersenne prime, also using GIMPS software.
The verification process has somewhat blurred the distinction between which number was discovered first, so credit is being split between the UCLA team of Edson Smith, George Woltman and Scott Kurowski, and Hans-Michael Elvenich.
The last prime number to be discovered before this year was over 9 million digits long, the largest found until the UCLA and Elvenich calculations. Its value was computed in January 2006 at the Central Missouri State University.
Previous to the 2006 discovery, the largest Mersenne prime number was the six million digit prime discovered by Michael Shafer in December 2003. Shafer made his discovery after joining the Great Internet Mersenne Prize Search.
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