The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) is a collaborative project of volunteers who use freely available software to search for Mersenne prime numbers.
In mathematics, a Mersenne prime is a prime number that is one less than a power of two. That is, it is a prime number of the form Mn = 2n − 1 for some integer n. They are named after Marin Mersenne, a French Minim friar, who studied them in the early 17th century. If n is a composite number then so is 2n − 1. Therefore, an equivalent definition of the Mersenne primes is that they are the prime numbers of the form Mp = 2p − 1 for some prime p.
A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways of writing it as a product, 1 × 5 or 5 × 1, involve 5 itself. However, 4 is composite because it is a product (2 × 2) in which both numbers are smaller than 4. Primes are central in number theory because of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic: every natural number greater than 1 is either a prime itself or can be factorized as a product of primes that is unique up to their order.
In number theory, Fermat's little theorem states that if p is a prime number, then for any integer a, the number ap − a is an integer multiple of p. In the notation of modular arithmetic, this is expressed as
In mathematics, the Lucas–Lehmer test (LLT) is a primality test for Mersenne numbers. The test was originally developed by Édouard Lucas in 1878 and subsequently proved by Derrick Henry Lehmer in 1930.
Derrick Henry "Dick" Lehmer, almost always cited as D.H. Lehmer, was an American mathematician significant to the development of computational number theory. Lehmer refined Édouard Lucas' work in the 1930s and devised the Lucas–Lehmer test for Mersenne primes. His peripatetic career as a number theorist, with him and his wife taking numerous types of work in the United States and abroad to support themselves during the Great Depression, fortuitously brought him into the center of research into early electronic computing.
George Woltman is the founder of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a distributed computing project researching Mersenne prime numbers using his software Prime95. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a degree in computer science. He lives in North Carolina. His mathematical libraries created for the GIMPS project are the fastest known for multiplication of large integers, and are used by other distributed computing projects as well, such as Seventeen or Bust.
In mathematics, a double Mersenne number is a Mersenne number of the form
In mathematics, the irrational base discrete weighted transform (IBDWT) is a variant of the fast Fourier transform using an irrational base; it was developed by Richard Crandall, Barry Fagin and Joshua Doenias in the early 1990s using Mathematica.
Richard Peirce Brent is an Australian mathematician and computer scientist. He is an emeritus professor at the Australian National University. From March 2005 to March 2010 he was a Federation Fellow at the Australian National University. His research interests include number theory, random number generators, computer architecture, and analysis of algorithms.
John Lewis Selfridge, was an American mathematician who contributed to the fields of analytic number theory, computational number theory, and combinatorics.
The largest known prime number is 282,589,933 − 1, a number which has 24,862,048 digits when written in base 10. It was found via a computer volunteered by Patrick Laroche of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) in 2018.
In computational number theory, a variety of algorithms make it possible to generate prime numbers efficiently. These are used in various applications, for example hashing, public-key cryptography, and search of prime factors in large numbers.
The Baillie–PSW primality test is a probabilistic or possibly deterministic primality testing algorithm that determines whether a number is composite or is a probable prime. It is named after Robert Baillie, Carl Pomerance, John Selfridge, and Samuel Wagstaff.
Riesel Sieve was a volunteer computing project, running in part on the BOINC platform. Its aim was to prove that 509,203 is the smallest Riesel number, by finding a prime of the form k × 2n − 1 for all odd k smaller than 509,203.
In mathematics, the Lucas–Lehmer–Riesel test is a primality test for numbers of the form N = k ⋅ 2n − 1 with odd k < 2n. The test was developed by Hans Riesel and it is based on the Lucas–Lehmer primality test. It is the fastest deterministic algorithm known for numbers of that form. For numbers of the form N = k ⋅ 2n + 1, either application of Proth's theorem or one of the deterministic proofs described in Brillhart–Lehmer–Selfridge 1975 are used.
The Lehmer random number generator, sometimes also referred to as the Park–Miller random number generator, is a type of linear congruential generator (LCG) that operates in multiplicative group of integers modulo n. The general formula is
In mathematics, the Pocklington–Lehmer primality test is a primality test devised by Henry Cabourn Pocklington and Derrick Henry Lehmer. The test uses a partial factorization of to prove that an integer is prime.
