A former Nvidia employee named Luke Durant made history on October 12th. Before taking a trip back to his home in Alabama, United States, he discovered the largest prime number ever known .
In addition to the significance of the discovery for mathematics itself, the achievement is also relevant for computing, because, although there are infinite prime numbers, identifying them currently requires the use of extremely powerful computers.
The prime number found by Durant, using a video card (GPU) manufactured by his former company, has more than 41 million digits actually 41,024,320 digits.
Called M136279841, it would take 475 days to read in full if each digit was pronounced in one second.
Written in decimals, this number starts with 8,816,943,275… and ends with 076,706,219,486,871,551, and 41 million more digits. If we wrote it in a book, the volume would be 20 thousand pages long.
And, if we were to record it on a computer in binary form (using just ones and zeros), the number would take up about 16 megabytes of memory, the same as a short TikTok video.
On the discovery, Durant spent almost a year of work and around US$2 million (around R$12 million at current prices) out of his own pocket.
The discovery
The number M136279841 is not only prime (that is, only divisible by itself and one), but it is also a Mersenne prime number, as it can be written in the form 2^p – 1, where p is also a prime number.
Mersenne prime numbers fascinate numerophiles because they represent a kind of fancy mathematical puzzle with a unique story.
To find them, there is a global collaborative computing project called the Great Internet Search for Mersenne Primes (GIMPS), of which Durant is part.
The name is a tribute to the French monk Marin Mersenne, who investigated these numerals more than 350 years ago. The first Mersenne primes are 3, 7, 31 and 127.
GIMPS co-founder George Woltman acknowledges that the discovery has no real purpose or utility. “It’s entertainment for math nerds,” he told The Washington Post.
A former computer programmer, Woltman said searching for new cousins “is a good way to pass the time” in his retirement.
Speaking of your software, already downloaded by around 3,000 to 5,000 volunteers, it promises literally infinite pleasure, which is the limit of existing prime numbers, as stated by Euclid around the year 300 BC
The application allows you to perform tasks in the space not used by volunteers on their computers, searching for numbers in the background.
Durant innovated and found the new prime number using publicly available unused cloud storage space .
How relevant is the discovery of the new prime number?
A graduate of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Durant told the Washington Post that he decided to invest his time and money in the project to show people that they are not defenseless against big tech.
“Individuals today are dramatically more capable than at any time in history,” he said, noting that the scale of cloud computing is “almost unfathomable.”
He guarantees that he managed to find this number, which is surprisingly large, using only the leftovers from big tech.
“It’s an attempt to highlight that we have incredible systems, so let’s figure out how to best use them,” he concluded.
The study of prime numbers is not just a weird curiosity or a pastime for nerds. Number theory is fundamental to modern cryptography .
RSA public key cryptography, an asymmetric coding method widely used in digital security systems, relies on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers.
The discovery of the largest known prime number earned Luke Durant a cash prize from GIMPS of US$3,000 (about R$17,000 at current exchange rates), an amount he donated to the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science, the public boarding school where he studied.
This content was originally published in Prime number of 41 million digits is discovered by mathematician on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
Charles Grill is a tech-savvy writer with over 3 years of experience in the field. He writes on a variety of technology-related topics and has a strong focus on the latest advancements in the industry. He is connected with several online news websites and is currently contributing to a technology-focused platform.
