Ran across this on youtube - a new largest known prime number was recently found: 2^{136,279,841} -1
Last big number was in 2018 – long gap.
Brian
“Math doesn’t take a holiday”
My mind boggles when I consider that the infinity of prime numbers is quite a bit smaller than the infinity of all numbers.
My mind boggles instead when I consider the infinity of prime numbers is not smaller than the infinity of all whole numbers.
My mind boggles when I consider that there infinities that are greater than other infinities.
Did Cantor understand infinity because he was crazy? Or did he go crazy when he understood infinity?
I believe that Cantor went crazy when his ideas about infinity (see posts #3 and #4 in this thread) were rejected by his coetaneous mathematicians, who ridiculed him and did not take him seriously.
I am not sure he understood infinity. I am not sure anyone understands infinity. But he understood it better than them.
Like Feynman’s statement that anyone that claiming to know quantum mechanics doesn’t know quantum mechanics.
I mentioned this in the interesting random fact thread a few days ago.
I forgot to mention that this also automatically means there’s another perfect number (even, of course).
So what’s the largest known non-Mersenne prime?
According to this, the 7 largest known primes are Mersenne primes. The eighth, the largest non-Mersenne prime, is 516693^{2097152}-516693^{1048576}+1. It has almost 12 million decimal digits, almost 1/3 as many digits as the new Mersenne prime.