FedEx Employee Discovers Largest Prime Number Ever at 23 Million Digits Long
Mathematicians are fascinated by prime numbers, those that can only be divided by themselves and the number 1. On Wednesday, it was announced that the new, longest known prime number had been discovered, according to New Scientist.
The discovery was made by Jonathan Pace, an engineer employed at Fedex and a volunteer with the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a collaborative project in which volunteers run software on their personal computers. The program searches for a type of prime number known as a Mersenne prime, a prime number that can be described by subtracting the number 1 from a given number of 2's multiplied together. According to GIMPS’s website, the newly discovered prime number is calculated by raising 2 to the 77,232,917th power and subtracting 1.
According to GIMPS’s website, Pace is a 51-year-old electrical engineer from Tennessee who runs several computers that constantly search for new Mersenne prime numbers. GIMPS also credits the organization’s founders and the authors of the software Pace used for the discovery. All the same, Pace will be taking home a $3,000 prize for the discovery.
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M77232917 itself is reportedly 23 million digits long. According to New Scientist, it is one million digits longer than its predecessor, which clocked in at 22 million digits.
While that gap may seem large to the uninitiated (e.g. this reporter), it’s a far shorter gap than what mathematicians expected to see, according to New Scientist. The greatest prime number discovered before M77232917 was found in 2015, and was 5 million digits longer than the one that came before it in 2013.
“I’m very surprised it was found this quickly; we expected it to take longer,” Chris Caldwell, a mathematics professor at the University of Tennessee told The Guardian, “It’s like finding dead cats on the road. You don’t expect to find two so close to one another.”
According to New Scientist, this discovery could mean that Mersenne primes are clustered together near the range in which M77232917 was discovered. Or, they could simply be more frequent than mathematicians previously believed.
As for the significance of new prime numbers, Caldwell told The Guardian “They are exciting to those of us who are interested in them. It’s like asking why do you climb a mountain.” While there are applications for smaller prime numbers, Caldwell explained that the larger ones fill a different need. “It’s a museum piece as opposed to something that industry would use,” he told The Guardian.