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Largest Prime Number Discovered

aggle-rithm said:
There's a theory that cicadas use prime numbers to protect themselves from fungi, but I understand that theory is in dispute.
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"Mario Markus, a physicist from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology in Germany has come up with a new theory. It's related to periodic predators. Suppose there are some predators (like birds, and the Cicada Killer Wasp) that attack cicadas, and that the cicadas emerge every 12 years. Then the predators that come out every two years will attack them, and so will the predators that come out every 3 years, 4 years and 6 years. But according Mario Markus, "if the cicadas mutate to 13-year cycles, they will survive.""

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2001/11/27/421251.htm?site=science/greatmomentsinscience
 
Hardly new. I remember reading a version of that at least fifteen years ago.
 
I'm pretty sure none of the applications of primes mentioned so far would need a 17 million digit prime. :)
 
phunk said:
I'm pretty sure none of the applications of primes mentioned so far would need a 17 million digit prime. :)
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Well no, but I bet you use parts of that 17 million digit prime every day. Just because we don't use the whole thing, all at once, doesn't mean it isn't useful. Math is generous like that. I hardly ever use more than a few thousand integers in the course of a year and there's an infinity to choose from.

If government were as generous as mathematics, someone would be here now, doing my taxes for me.
 
nimzov said:
"Mario Markus, a physicist from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology in Germany has come up with a new theory. It's related to periodic predators. Suppose there are some predators (like birds, and the Cicada Killer Wasp) that attack cicadas, and that the cicadas emerge every 12 years. Then the predators that come out every two years will attack them, and so will the predators that come out every 3 years, 4 years and 6 years. But according Mario Markus, "if the cicadas mutate to 13-year cycles, they will survive.""

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2001/11/27/421251.htm?site=science/greatmomentsinscience
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The predators that come out every year, as most do, can of course get them after thirteen (or in some other cicada populations, seventeen) years or any other length of time. But many predators exhibit regular cycles of abundance, and the prime numbers counteract these. Presumably the predators' regular abundances applied a "sieve of Eratosthenes" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes, "example") process to the cicadas, leaving in place those populations appearing after a sufficiently large (relative to average bird and insect longevity) prime number of years had elapsed, thus "outliving" their predators.
 
LandR said:
(requires thousands of years running time rather than millenia).

I think that's a good thing though.
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What did you mean here? Millenia are thousands of years.

But I agree with you that paranoia on the part of cryptographers is a good thing.
 
If I am not mistaken, oak trees (Quercus sp.) and other species that produce a bumper crop of acorns (or similar) do so on prime number cycles (7 being common).
 
marplots said:
Well no, but I bet you use parts of that 17 million digit prime every day. Just because we don't use the whole thing, all at once, doesn't mean it isn't useful. Math is generous like that. I hardly ever use more than a few thousand integers in the course of a year and there's an infinity to choose from.

If government were as generous as mathematics, someone would be here now, doing my taxes for me.
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Well, sure, that 17 million digit number is made up of the digits 0-9, so in that way we use parts of it. But there is nothing special about any subset of the digits in a prime that makes them useful, is there?
 
phunk said:
Well, sure, that 17 million digit number is made up of the digits 0-9, so in that way we use parts of it. But there is nothing special about any subset of the digits in a prime that makes them useful, is there?
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Can't actually think of one, so no.

On the bright side, we now have the answer to a trivia question.
 
I was going to post a link to the Fox News article on this subject and vent my nerd-rage, but they seemed to have realized their error and corrected it.

There was a line in the article that said something like "Prime numbers don't have much importance to mathematics."

It's like saying quarks aren't important to physics.

Here's the corrected article.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/02/05/worlds-largest-prime-number-discovered/
 
Crossbow said:
University of Central Missouri mathematician Curtis Cooper
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If you had a job that involved discovering record-sized prime numbers, wouldn't you sign your press releases Curtis "Sheldon" Cooper?
 
uhh...okay...

I say numeral 1. It encompasses all.
I think the OP listed the longest...
 
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phunk said:
I'm pretty sure none of the applications of primes mentioned so far would need a 17 million digit prime. :)
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It's the new service target for McDonalds: "Over 257,885,161 - 1 served!"
 
dlorde said:
Is there any practical use for such large primes?
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Let's say there's not. So what? It doesn't mean that there's not something to learn in the future. And if we as a society decide to abandon all but the immeditely practical scientific and mathematical explorations, we'll very soon find ourselves in a smaller and smaller world.

This is an amazing achievement. Why is that not enough?
 
Simon Singh's book the Codebreakers, IIRC, spent a lot of time talking about primes in cryptology.
 
I don't know how these prime finding algorithms work. Has every prime number up to this new one been discovered and now there are only larger primes left?
 
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