The Mersenne Newsletter, issue #6 September 3, 1996


New Mersenne Prime!
-------------------

Congratulations go to David Slowinski and Paul Gage. In early April,
they discovered the 34th known Mersenne prime: 2^1257787-1. The find
took 6 hours on a Cray supercomputer. You can read all about it in
the San Jose Mercury News,
http://www.sjmercury.com/business/compute/prime.htm
or the Silicon Graphics web page,
http://reality.sgi.com/csp/ioccc/noll/prime/prime_press.html

At David's request, the find was not announced until today.

On April 15, David asked me to verify his new find. Ironicly, at the
time I received his email, my own Pentium-90 was 95% of the way through
testing that exponent. That hurt for a few days! However, I also saw a
lot of positives. Despite a two-year head start, David found the new
prime only a few days before we did. Furthermore, our effort was just
getting under way, we now have more than 4 times as many searchers as
we did then. I firmly believe that the 35th Mersenne prime will be
found by a member of our group! I have but one regret: After picking
the lucky 1257 range, I wish I had run it on my Pentium Pro 200 instead
of the Pentium-90!

Our group has made great progress since April in closing the gaps
left by David and in searching the new territory above 1257787.
Keep up the good work!


Best wishes and Good luck,
George Woltman
woltman@magicnet.net