Happy Lunar New Year!

Hooray for distributed computing. A Central Missouri State University team participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project has discovered the largest known prime number: M30402457, i.e., 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1. I’m not going to paste the entire number here, but if you want to plop the debutante prime into your conspiracy decoder rings, GIMPS has posted the entire 9,152,052 digit number here.

If you’re not already playing with proteins or listening for little green men through Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), you might consider donating your computer’s down time to GIMPS. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is offering a financial award for the first individual or team to discover a prime number with at least 10,000,000 decimal digits, and GIMPS is willing to share the prize money.