On Sat, Dec 01, 2001 at 09:55:18AM -0800, Spike Jones wrote:
>
> The new Mersenne prime is 2^13,466,917 - 1.
I better get down to the local library tomorrow. As a kid, I found a
copy of Hans Riesel's book on prime numbers in the math section, saying
that the largest known mersenne prime was 2^<some number>-1. Beneath it
somebody had noted down 2^<some other number>-1 and a date, with a
second line beneath that one with an even larger number and later date.
I of course added the currently largest prime. Some years later I passed
by that book and checked, and somebody else had continued the updating.
These days I actually have my office across the hallway from Riesel, who
is professor emeritus at my department. He had a Mersenne prime record
with 2^3217 - 1 in 1957, using Sweden's first electronic computer.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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