2008 Woodie Awards
Prime discovery at Central
Rachel Harper
Issue date: 1/19/06 Section: News
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The largest known prime number was found Dec. 15 in the department of communication computer lab.
Steven Boone, professor of chemistry and associate dean of college of arts and sciences, and Curtis Cooper, professor of computer science and mathematics, have come the closest to claiming the award with the discovery of a 9.1 million-digit number expressed as M30402457, or 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1.
"This project has been a big deal," Cooper said. "Many stories about this breakthrough in mathematical sciences have been published in many international media areas in France, Germany, China and other countries."
The number discovered at Central is the 43rd number part of a special class of rare prime numbers. These numbers are known as Mersenne primes, named after a French monk, Marin Mersenne, who studied these numbers more than 350 years ago. These two faculty members used idle time on 700 campus lab PCs and free software from www.mersenne.org as part of a world-wide computing grid of tens of thousands of computers working together to make this discovery. The software, Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), was developed by George Woltman and Scott Kurowski.
According to Woltman's press release, most GIMPS participants study Mersenne primes for the fun of having a role in pure mathematical research and the chance of finding a new one.
"Finding this Mersenne prime was not our focus," Boone said. "If it was our focus we would have computers programmed to work bigger numbers."
Cooper started this project nine years ago with the help of colleagueVince Edmondson, professor of mathematics, who died in 2003.
"We started off with four computers; I could not handle any more than that," Cooper said. "The first year, I carried a disk everywhere. By the end of the summer, I had about thirty computers with the program."
Boone and Cooper work with Information Services to make sure they are not compromising the campus computing infrastructure. Seven hundred campus computers are part of an international grid called PrimeNet. PrimeNet organizes the parallel-number crunching to create a virtual supercomputer, running 24 hours a day at 18 trillion calculations per second. PrimeNet is a server based in San Diego that gives all the computers working on the calculations the numbers to compute.
Steven Boone, professor of chemistry and associate dean of college of arts and sciences, and Curtis Cooper, professor of computer science and mathematics, have come the closest to claiming the award with the discovery of a 9.1 million-digit number expressed as M30402457, or 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1.
"This project has been a big deal," Cooper said. "Many stories about this breakthrough in mathematical sciences have been published in many international media areas in France, Germany, China and other countries."
The number discovered at Central is the 43rd number part of a special class of rare prime numbers. These numbers are known as Mersenne primes, named after a French monk, Marin Mersenne, who studied these numbers more than 350 years ago. These two faculty members used idle time on 700 campus lab PCs and free software from www.mersenne.org as part of a world-wide computing grid of tens of thousands of computers working together to make this discovery. The software, Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), was developed by George Woltman and Scott Kurowski.
According to Woltman's press release, most GIMPS participants study Mersenne primes for the fun of having a role in pure mathematical research and the chance of finding a new one.
"Finding this Mersenne prime was not our focus," Boone said. "If it was our focus we would have computers programmed to work bigger numbers."
Cooper started this project nine years ago with the help of colleagueVince Edmondson, professor of mathematics, who died in 2003.
"We started off with four computers; I could not handle any more than that," Cooper said. "The first year, I carried a disk everywhere. By the end of the summer, I had about thirty computers with the program."
Boone and Cooper work with Information Services to make sure they are not compromising the campus computing infrastructure. Seven hundred campus computers are part of an international grid called PrimeNet. PrimeNet organizes the parallel-number crunching to create a virtual supercomputer, running 24 hours a day at 18 trillion calculations per second. PrimeNet is a server based in San Diego that gives all the computers working on the calculations the numbers to compute.