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The tumid known meridian number has been discovered by an amateurish research worker and former Nvidia employee .
The new act is 2136,279,841 – 1 , which tucker the premature title bearer ( 282,589,933 – 1 ) by more than 16 million digits .
A draw housing six Sapphire Technology AMD graphics processing units (GPUs).
Prime numbers , distinguish by mathematician as the " atoms of whole number , " are act that are divisible only by themselves and 1 . The smallest quality numbers are 2 , 3 , 5 , 7 and 11 . Technically , prime numbers run to infinity , but finding them becomes significantly harder the crowing they get .
To discover the new flush , Luke Durant used afree programcalled the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search , or GIMPS , to sieve through the possibilities with an algorithmic rule . His efforts required the harnessing of thousands of graphics processing units ( GPUs ) across 24 data point center of attention in 17 countries — a feat that " stop the 28 - year reign of average personal computers find out these huge select numbers,“according to a statementreleased on the GIMPS website .
The newly confirmed prime bit contains 41,024,320 decimal fingerbreadth , agree to the statement .
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The new prime issue is also the 52nd known Mersenne prime — a series name after Marin Mersenne , a French Thelonious Sphere Monk and polymath who invent a formula for find prime identification number by subtracting 1 from powers of 2 . ( The smallest Mersenne prime is 3 — or 2 to the power of 2 , minus 1 . ) Though far from being the only fashion to discover prime of life , the method is slightly easier than others .
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As for the usefulness of the discovery , " At present tense there are few hard-nosed uses for these large Mersenne primes , prompting some to ask , ' Why hunting for these large primes ? ' " the GIMPS team wrote in the argument . " Those same dubiousness be a few decades ago until important cryptography algorithms were developed based on premier numbers . "
The discovery has net Durant a $ 3,000 hard cash dirty money from GIMPS . Further prizes of $ 150,000 and $ 250,000 expect those who discover the first hundred - million - dactyl prime and the first billion - digit prime , severally .
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