p2pnet news view | Cool:- The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) sponsors cooperative computing awards with more than a million dollars in prize money.

The idea, it says, emphasizing the cash comes from an “individual EFF supporter,” not, “membership dues, corporate or foundation grants, or other general EFF funds,” is to encourage ordinary Net users to contribute to solving huge scientific problems.

Now, researchers have discovered the first 10 million digit prime number as part of a 12-year-old, world-wide volunteer computing project, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (”GIMPS”).

It can be written shorthand as 243,112,609-1 and qualifies for the $100,000 EFF award, “most of which GIMPS will donate to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and to charity,” promises.

Says GIMPS »»»

Congratulations to Edson Smith, who was responsible for installing and maintaining the GIMPS software on the UCLA Mathematics Department’s computers.On September 6th, the 46th known Mersenne prime, 2^37,156,667-1, a 11,185,272 digit number was found by Hans-Michael Elvenich in Langenfeld near Cologne, Germany! This was the first Mersenne prime to be discovered out of order since Colquitt and Welsh discovered 2^110,503-1 in 1988.

The nearly decade long quest for the EFF award came down to a close race to the finish – with just two weeks separating the discovery of the two primes.

It adds:

“In recognition of the individual discoverers, the GIMPS project leaders, and every GIMPS participant’s contributions, credit for the two primes goes to ‘Edson Smith, George Woltman, Scott Kurowski, et al.’, and ‘Hans-Michael Elvenich, George Woltman, Scott Kurowski, et al.’.

“Edson Smith has worked in the IT industry for 27 years and the last 10 years as the Computing Manager for the UCLA Mathematics Department. Last Fall he replaced the Lab’s screen savers with prime95 – a perfect fit for the Mathematics Department. UCLA has a rich history in the discovery of Mersenne primes. Dr. Raphael Robinson found five Mersenne primes at UCLA in 1952 and Alex Hurwitz found two more in 1961.

“Hans-Michael Elvenich is a 44 year old Electrical Engineer working for Lanxess, a chemical company. He is a prime number enthusiast and is the owner and operator of www.primzahlen.de. In German, prime numbers are called ‘Primzahlen’.”

Los Angeles Times – , September , 2008

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 9:27 am and is filed under Cool Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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