NEW MERSENNE PRIME FOUND!
Lightning strikes twice. On September 4, 2006, in the same room just a few feet away from their last find, Dr. Curtis Cooper and Dr. Steven Boone's team broke their own , discovering the 44th known Mersenne prime, 232,582,657-1. The new prime at is 650,000 digits larger than their previous record prime found last December. However, the new prime falls short of the 10 million digits required for GIMPS to claim the .
With five record primes found in less than 3 years, GIMPS has been on an incredible lucky streak. Never before have Mersenne primes been bunched so closely together. When looking at the exponents, we expect only 1.78 Mersenne primes between powers of two, and prior to 2003, a maximum of 3 Mersenne primes were found between powers of two. The last 5 Mersenne prime exponents all fell between 224 and 225 -- and we haven't finished testing all the exponents in that range!
The new prime was independently verified in 6 days by Tony Reix of Bull S.A. in Grenoble, France using 16 Itanium2 1.5 GHz CPUs of a at Bull Grenoble Research Center, running the by Guillermo Ballester Valor of Granada, Spain.
