Featured Image Credit: Numberphile2/YouTube / Yuichiro Chino/Getty
When it comes to spending your money wisely, there are those who are good at it and those who aren't.
$2 million is a life-changing sum, but instead of buying some house on the coast, an Aston Martin Valiant, or packing in your job and living it on Easy Street for the rest of your life, how about spending all that money on discovering a new number?
Equally, there have been some brilliant mathematicians over the years, with 36-year-old Luke Durant hoping to bd remembered alongside the Pythagorases (the man, not the theorem) and Einsteins of this world.
Mathematicians are always trying to outdo each other, and in one of their strangest fields, they're continuing to discover prime numbers. It apparently gets increasingly diffiuclt to find numbers that are only divisible by themselves the higher you go, but thanks to Durant, we've got a brand-new prime number. Standing at 41 million digits long, 2136,279,841 – 1 is now the world's largest prime number.
Durant has called his discovery 'M136279841' and uncovered it by multiplying 136,279,841 twos and then subtracting one.
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As well as being a whopping 16 million digits bigger than the last prime number, Durant's research also let to the 52nd Mersenne prime number being discovered. Mersenne are their own class and are defined by prime numbers that are one less than a power of two.
Anyone who discovers a new Mersenne prime number wins $3,000, but before you go cheering Durant's windfall, let's crunch the numbers.
The whole experiment was conducted by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), but more than just being a great acronym, it costs a lot of money. Having spent around $2 million of his own money, Durant put a year's worth of work into the project, using thousands of graphics processing units placed in 24 data centers across 17 different countries.
Durant says he quickly realized that the $3,000 for discovering a new Mersenne prime number is 'not a lot' compared the expenditure needed, and in a kind gesture, he's donated the prize money to his old high school at the Alabama School of Math and Science.
As for his research, Durant took a different route to previous experiments by utilizing unused cloud storage space.
The GIMPS statement notes how this breakthrough "ends the 28-year reign of ordinary personal computers finding these huge prime numbers."
Despite the massive cost to his own pocket, Durant told The Washington Post it was worth the time and money: "Individuals today are dramatically more capable than any point in history.
"The scale of computing available in the cloud, it’s nearly unfathomable. I was able to find this number that’s astonishingly large … but I was able to do it just by using big tech’s leftovers. So it’s trying to [highlight the fact that] we have these incredible systems, so let’s figure out how to best use them."
Still, with the GIMPS pointing out that there are few known practical uses for Mersenne prime numbers, some might argue this isn't exactly $2 million well spent.
