GIMPS finds the 40th Mersenne Prime!!!
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On November 17th GIMPS member Michael Shafer at Michigan State University proved 2^20996011-1 prime. At over 6.3 million digits it is easily the largest known prime number, beating GIMPS' 2 year old record of just over 4 million digits. You can read more about the discovery at the GIMPS Home page, http://www.mersenne.org.
Congratulations to Michael and all GIMPS members for our sixth success! Good luck to all in the search for the 41st Mersenne prime! With a lot of luck you could even share in the $100,000 EFF award for finding a 10,000,000 digit prime!!
Hm. I wonder how long it would take bc or gmp to calculate that value...
