dgiaimo, this one's for you
by In case you didn't already hear, the largest prime number yet has been discovered!
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ok, i tried to read this article, but really, who cares?
Do you want a serious answer to that? Almost nobody really cares about the GIMPS project. It's not interesting from a mathematical point of view since all the mathematics that goes into it has been well-known for a long time. It's not interesting from a cryptological viewpoint since these primes are far too large to use for cryptographic purposes. It's not even really interesting from a computational viewpoint since all the computations that need to be done are done on the exponent in the Mersenne prime which, even for the latest prime they found, isn't particularly large yet. The only people who really care are the people who get into the record books for a short period of time because their computer happened to get chosen to do the calculation on the exponent that turned out to generate a prime. Still, it's kinda fun to keep track of the GIMPS project.
Interesting. I hadn't heard that the GIMPS project had found a new Mersenne prime recently.
(BTW, my name is spelled Giaimo, not Giamo.)