An Update: The discovery of the prime number was named as one of the top 50 inventions of the year by Time Magazine. Tune into the CBC Radio podcast to hear Jeff Gilchrist explain:
http://www.cbc.ca/ottawa/features/podcast/
Jeff Gilchrist, a Carleton University doctoral student, is part of an international team that has discovered the largest known prime number which contains 12.9 million digits.
It is the first prime number ever discovered with more than 10 million digits and qualifies for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Cooperative Computing Award of $100,000 U.S.
Gilchrist says: “To get an idea of how large this number really is, if you printed all of the digits in a book, it would be over 3,200 pages long. That would fill the majority of the Harry Potter series of books. I find it fascinating that a number with over 12 million digits cannot be equally divided by another number except one and itself.”
The record-breaking prime number was initially discovered by Edson Smith a computing manager in the math department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He volunteers computing resources for the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a global collaboration of tens of thousands of computers working together to find new primes.
The number was independently verified by Gilchrist using 16 days of super-computer resources provided by the Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network (SHARCNET), a consortium of colleges and universities in Ontario.
A prime number can only be equally divided by the number one and itself. Prime number discoveries must be independently verified using different software on a different hardware system to ensure there were no errors in the original calculation.
Large prime numbers are important to number theorists and for cryptography. “Some cryptographic algorithms are used for Internet security and e-commerce relies on the difficulty of finding large prime numbers,” says Gilchrist, “but these systems have not been compromised by this new discovery.”
Gilchrist is a doctoral student in the department of systems and computer engineering, currently researching models to detect medical problems in infants at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO). His supervisors are Dr. Monique Frize and Dr. Colleen M. Ennett.
Gilchrist has now co-verified six record-breaking prime numbers. The first number, in 2004, was a mere seven million digits. His latest prime number can be written in shorthand as 243,112,609-1.
Listen to Jeff being interviewed on CBC’s As It Happens. Jeff was on the show during the first half hour and then short hits just before the end of the second and third half hours. http://www.cbc.ca/radioshows/AS_IT_HAPPENS/20080916.shtml
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For more information:
Lin Moody
Media Relations
Carleton University
613-520-2600 ext. 8705
