According to GIMPS, this is the first time a prime number was not found by an ordinary PC, but rather a “‘cloud supercomputer’ spanning 17 countries” that utilized an Nvidia A100 GPU chip to make the initial diagnosis. The primary architect of this find is Luke Durant, who worked at Nvidia as a software engineer for 11 years
And this helps humanity and mathematicians by…nothing. It’s absolutely nothing.
Finally! Someone who understands! If it’s not something we can understand, it’s not really math.
I don’t know why Nvidia is mentioned at all, except the hardware. That’s cool that this person found the number, but Nvidia didn’t do anything except employ them once upon a time and make a product that does a thing. It’s not justified to celebrate the maker of a stove when a soup kitchen feeds everyone.
This is a win for Luke and GIMPS in general, and I’m happy for them.
I don’t understand this and therefore it’s stupid and pointless. Fuck you math elitist assholes with your so-called “large” prime numbers spending billions of dollars that could be used to make my life better. I don’t comprehend this at all and there it does not matter. The end.
All knowledge is good knowledge
Ohhh, you’ve never gained pandemic weight and then gone shopping for jeans in public and seen yourself in a mirror, have you
I don’t know if this is a common feature of large primes, but the digits in the exponent (136,279,841) themselves represent a prime number.
🤯
that does happen to be one of the defining characteristics of mersenne primes.
And searching for mersenne primes happens to be the easiest known way to find extremely large prime numbers (via the Special Number Field Sieve I believe)
