Super excited

From CNN.com (January 4, 2006):

Researchers discover largest prime number

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) -- 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 years ago.

A prime number is a positive number divisible by only itself and 1 -- 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on.

The number that the team found is 9.1 million digits long. It is a Mersenne prime known as M30402457 -- that's 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1.

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," 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.

I have looked for many things in this life: a non-comodogenic moisturizer, environmentally friendly insect soap, quiet toddler toys, the Canadian Embassy in Paris, the perfect veggie burrito, discount coupons for Vlasic pickles, the quarter that the big dog swallowed when I was 7, midgets. Never would it have occurred to me to look for a number 9.1 million digits long, let alone a PRIME number 9.1 million digits long.

But I'm super excited that Boone and Cooper are taking care of it.