UCLA Mathematicians Discover 13-Million-Digit Prime Number

I saw this story from last Saturday's Los Angeles Times on how mathematicians from the University of California, Los Angeles, have found "the first verified Mersenne prime number with more than 10 million digits, putting them in line to win a six-digit prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation."

And they did it using a Dell OptiPlex 745 running Microsoft Windows XP.

The article goes on to say that UCLA mathematicians have made other discoveries including in 1952, when Raphael Robinson found five of them using UCLA's Standards Western Automatic Computer. In 1961, Alexander Hurwitz discovered two more, each with more than 1,200 digits, on the university's IBM 7090 mainframe.

About the Author: Bruce Anderson