A relative newcomer to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has broken a six-year drought in the search for the next prime oasis in a desert of boring ol' composite numbers.

First, it's a prime number (meaning it is only divisible by itself and one). Second, it's what is called a Mersenne prime (we'll get to what that means). And third, it is to date the largest prime ...

Luke Durant, 36, a former Nvidia employee, used a free software called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, to test whether suspected large numbers were prime numbers using an ...

Durant’s success stems in part from new clever software from the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search and in part from heavy-duty hardware and computational muscle that he personally mobilized ...

A relative newcomer to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has broken a six-year drought in the search for the next prime oasis in a desert of boring ol' composite numbers, reports ...

The historic finding is classified as a Mersenne prime, which is named after the French monk Marin Mersenne, who studied these numbers more than 350 years ago. Mersenne primes are a rare kind of ...

Luke Durant, a 36 year-old researcher and former NVIDIA employee, used a free program, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), to identify the new prime through an advanced algorithm. The ...