Slow dayFollow

i think I'll sit around and try to indentify Prime Numbers!!


KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) -- Researchers at a Missouri university have identified the largest known prime number, officials said Tuesday.


http://edition.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/01/04/largest.prime.number.ap/index.html


Can you imagine the metality that it must take to.. desire numbers? At one point in high school I learned to extract some enjoyment in solving algebraic equations.... but honestly.... Wahtever the OPPoSITE of ADD is- THESe guys got it.

oh and the number that the team found is 9.1 million digits long. It is a Mersenne prime known as M30402457 -- that's 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1.

And I thought some of you had too much time on your hands!

No points, only whole numbers.

But all these guys really did is watch a computer do all the work. Something which all of us are doing right now anyways. (except those of you jacking off to ****, you're doing half of the work)

You mean like this?

http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/mathq.htm

Larger primes alow us to crack larger encryption schemes (based on the rising to the power of some public/private key), correct? So as we advance our knowlege of primes it makes some encryption schemes more trivial to break, and slightly larger ones more dangerous to trust in. Advancements in the number of primes and the size of them coupled with the speed at which they are found should lead to a paradigm shift in the way encryption technology works.