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New largest prime number discovered by former Nvidia software engineer (sherwood.news)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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According to GIMPS, this is the first time a prime number was not found by an ordinary PC, but rather a “‘cloud supercomputer’ spanning 17 countries” that utilized an Nvidia A100 GPU chip to make the initial diagnosis. The primary architect of this find is Luke Durant, who worked at Nvidia as a software engineer for 11 years

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I don't know if this is a common feature of large primes, but the digits in the exponent (136,279,841) themselves represent a prime number.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

that does happen to be one of the defining characteristics of mersenne primes.

And searching for mersenne primes happens to be the easiest known way to find extremely large prime numbers (via the Special Number Field Sieve I believe)

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