Thursday, January 05, 2006

News you probably can't use

"KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) -- Researchers at a Missouri university have identified the largest known prime number, officials said Tuesday.

"The team at Central Missouri State University, led by associate dean Steven Boone and mathematics professor Curtis Cooper, found it in mid-December after programming 700 computers years ago.

"A prime number is a positive number divisible by only itself and 1 -- 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on.

"The number that the team found is 9.1 million digits long. It is a Mersenne prime known as M30402457 -- that's 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1."

posted by Tim Beidel at 1/05/2006 08:55:00 AM