The Mersenne Newsletter, issue #8 November 23, 1996


New Mersenne Prime! 2^1398269-1 is prime!
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Thanks to everyone's hard work, GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search)
has discovered the 35th known Mersenne Prime! Joel Armengaud made the
discovery on November 13. Amazingly, he kept this secret while he
double-checked the find on two other computers. On the 18th, he notified
Richard Crandall, Chris Caldwell, and myself. I verified it on my machine
on the 20th. Slowinski, who was out of town at the time, provided the
independent verification on the 22nd.

More information can be found at these three web sites:
http://www.sjmercury.com/business/compute/prime1122.htm
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/justforfun/1398269.htm
http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/notes/1398269.html

As had been agreed upon before hand, credit for this new prime will go
to Armengaud, Woltman, et. al.

We were incredibly lucky to find this prime. In percentage terms, this
is the 6th smallest gap between Mersenne exponents. The range from
1,000,000 to 2,000,000 was expected to contain 1.78 Mersenne primes.
There are already 2 known and probablities suggest there will be one more.
Let's go find that one too!

Congratulations to all,
George Woltman
woltman@magicnet.net