M41

M41 is the short hand used to refer to the 41st Mersenne prime 2^{24 036 583}-1.

$2^{24036583}-1$ was discovered to be prime on 2004-05-15 by Josh Findley, using Prime95 written by George Woltman. At the time of discovery, it was the largest known prime number. The number is 7 816 230 decimal digits long. This prime number was the seventh record prime found by the GIMPS project.

The discovery took 14 days of computing on 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 Windows XP PC.

The new prime was independently verified:

• by Tony Reix of Grenoble, France using half of a Bull NovaScale 5000 HPC running Linux on 16 Itanium II 1.3 GHz CPUs for five days using the Glucas program by Guillermo Ballester Valor of Granada, Spain;
• by Jeff Gilchrist of Elytra Enterprises Inc. in Ottawa, Canada using eleven days of time on a HP rx5670 quad Itanium II 1.5 GHz CPU server at SHARCNET.

External links

• GIMPS Discovers 41st Mersenne Prime (press release)