New + Mersenne + Largest Prime Found

A new prime has been found! This rumour was floating around for a few days now on the mersenne.org forums but all tests are complete and they have decided to announce it. It is a gigantic number.

There is a collaborative project called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search where people all over the world contribute computational resources to find more prime numbers. The details are in the press release and will no doubt be picked up by most media outlets + pop-science media pretty soon so I wont do too much exposition and waste my time. I will, however, write why this is exciting to me, and should be to anyone that likes science.

When the last Mersenne prime was discovered (these primes are easier to search for and easier to test for using the Lucas-Lehmer test), I was really into Number Theory and my friends and I really put a lot of thought into how one would find the next Mersenne Prime. To give some context, three Mersenne Primes were found in three years making it seem, to the amateur mathematicians in us, that this was not too unachievable. As it turned out, it took almost six years for the next one to be discovered. There are a few things that have changed since then, first is that they use a probabilistic search to filter out non-primes quicker, and secondly, this is the first time GPUs were involved in this project. Usually, these initial breakthroughs in science are followed by a string of other results improving on these methods. So, we might get a few more primes in the next two or three years. I wonder how the Nvidia stock price will react to this information.