What a cool Christmas gift!
Posted by Kathryn on 25th December and posted in Fun things, Home Life, Math, Off time, Science, Web sites
As many of you know, I’m active in BOINC. One of the projects I participate in is PrimeGrid. It’s a project that helps search for prime numbers of certain types. I don’t even pretend to understand the math. I just know a prime number is one that is only divisible by one and itself (for example 3, 5, 7, 13…). There’s a bunch of different sorts of special primes that correspond to certain formulas. But like I said, I’m not going to even pretend to understand the intricacies of the math. I’ve been an on again, off again participant for over a year now. I come back to it for two reasons. First, the work units themselves are short (at least for the subprojects I’ve chosen). And second, Rytis, the project administrator is a genuinely nice guy. He’s a college student in Lithuania and his English is probably better than mine. We chat via IM at least a couple times a week.
A few hours ago, I noticed I had gotten an email. My in box has been pretty quiet over the last few days because of the holidays so I was surprised to see the email. I was even more surprised to see that I (well, my computer) had discovered a prime big enough for inclusion in “The List of Largest Known Primes“.
My prime is 28739399349*2^333333-1 and contains 100354 digits. It’s currently ranked at #4306. When I submitted it, they estimate that at the current rate of prime discovery it will remain in the top primes list for approximately 10 weeks. So I guess I get 10 weeks rather than 15 minutes of fame.
Just for fun, I took a screen shot of my current certificate of computation.
Wow! Big big congratz on finding that prime! :)
I’m trying to find one from time to time but no success yet. *grin*
PS: Hope you had nice Christmas Days! And I wish you a very Happy New Year!