“Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate.”
A huge math discovery in December was made in the unlikeliest of places: on a church computer in a Memphis suburb.
The background software running on the computer unearthed a rare kind of prime number called a Mersenne prime. It was the 50th and largest one to be found, containing over 23 million digits.
But for this behemoth to come to light, someone had to have installed free software used to search for Mersenne prime numbers, and that someone is Jon Pace, a deacon, FedEx finance manager and math aficionado who had spent 14 years hunting for such a number.
“There are tens of thousands of computers involved in the search,” Mr. Pace, 51, said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “On average, they are finding less than one a year. The odds of one of my computers making a prime number discovery are astronomical.”
Mr. Pace’s discovery is known as M77232917 and was announced on Jan. 3. It is expressed as 277,232,917 – 1 and is 23,249,425 digits, nearly one million digits larger than the previous record-holder, which The New York Times wrote about in 2016. As we explained then:
A prime number is not divisible by any positive integer except 1 and itself. Some prime numbers are named after Marin Mersenne, a French theologian and mathematician who studied them in the early 17th century. They can be written in the form 2n – 1 where n is an integer. For example, 3 is a Mersenne prime. Plug in 2 for n, and you find 22 − 1 = 4 − 1 = 3. But not all integers plugged into this expression generate a prime number, and as integers get bigger, prime numbers become rarer.
