45th Mersenne prime probably discovered

A computer forming part of the GIMPS distributed internet project reported on 23rd August having found a new Mersenne prime. However with the leader of the project, George Woltman, on holiday, there was a delay of a couple of days in starting the two verification runs – on two different computers using two different programs and algorithms. The results should be available on 12th and 16th of September – the prospective prime will not be released until verification is complete.

The new prime is not necessarily larger than the 44th Mersenne prime – 2^32,582,657-1, discovered on 4th September 2006. There are still many candidate numbers less than this.

(trk)