Confessions of a Total World Dominator

Another one from the "These people have way too much time on their hands department"....And from Kansas City for crying out loud...well I guess all there really IS to do there is go cow tipping...

Mo. Researchers Find Largest Prime Number By GARANCE BURKE, Associated Press Writer
Tue Jan 3, 10:09 PM ET

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Researchers at a Missouri university have identified the largest known prime number, officials said Tuesday.

The team at Central Missouri State University, led by associate dean Steven Boone and mathematics professor Curtis Cooper, found it in mid-December after programming 700 computers (There are children starving in Africa and these people acquired 700 computers????? Just to find the largest prime number?) years ago.

A prime number is a positive number divisible by only itself (thank you for the math lesson...) and 1 — 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on.

The number that the team found is 9.1 million digits long (really the point please...I'm waiting!). It is a Mersenne prime known as M30402457 — that's 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1 (Okay, today children we're going to start counting to M30402457, if we start now maybe your great great great to the M30402457th power grandchildren can finish for us!).

Mersenne primes are a special category expressed as 2 to the "p" power minus 1, in which "p" also is a prime number.

"We're super excited," (Yeah he was beaming...and jumping up and down like he had just won an all expenses paid trip to Mars...)said Boone, a chemistry professor. "We've been looking for such a number for a long time."

The discovery is affiliated with the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, a global contest using volunteers who run software that searches for the largest Mersenne prime.

Okay...really is there any real scientific benefit to the world for this discovery? And if numbers are really infinite, why are we so excited about this one, since another 36 trillion numbers away is the next one perhaps a Z95666754321 or something....we need to find a cure for cancer amongst other things and there are people looking for some odd number...this is a crazy world we live in...

Today is my first normal day in over two weeks...it's been a little rough. I was home for Christmas, and then Ruthanne was here all week. It was so much fun! I need to have friends out here more often...wink wink nudge nudge....more later...need to go get screaming children...