LOS ANGELES – Mathematicians at UCLA have discovered a 13-million-digit prime number, a long-sought milestone that makes them eligible for a $100,000 prize.
The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was verified by a different computer system running a different algorithm.
… and why it is an important mathematical find;
Large prime numbers serve as the foundation for the cryptological techniques used to keep online transactions and coded communications secure — although the current generation of crypto codes doesn’t require numbers quite as big as the one discovered by UCLA.
Interesting enough the Mersenne Org ( http://www.mersenne.org/ ) does not give any credit to Windows XP. Instead they prefer to attribute the feat of verification to a SUN SPARC system.
Life is though.