Talk:Largest known prime number
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Citing references 1 and 8 (someone's private webpage) is NOT AUTH SOURCE
[edit]Landon Noll's private website is NOT an authoritative source and should be reverted. Suggest to hold on and LOCK this page until the official public release. Serge Batalov (talk) 16:30, 16 October 2024 (UTC)
- If anybody is curious the two sources are no longer on the web. (And the Wikipedia changes have been rolled back.) Dan Bloch (talk) 00:55, 17 October 2024 (UTC)
graph feels like it is overfitted
[edit]suddenly changing from "doubles every x years" to "grows by 10^6 every y years" doesn't seem like it really accurately models the data Liambdonegan01 (talk) 10:10, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
Wrong Number Of Digits
[edit]The text file of the 52nd Mersenne prime has 820468 lines with 100 numbers each. And the last row has 40 characters, so it should be 82,048,640 digits long. I haven't checked all of them, but from the 52nd to the 49th Mersenne primes the number of digits seems to be half of what it is in mersenne.org, is there a reason? Turrettr (talk) 13:13, 25 October 2024 (UTC)
- It seems that the lower number of digits is base 10, but I don't understand how the text file is presented or why it's so much bigger. (Hohum @) 15:55, 25 October 2024 (UTC)
- ok, figured it out.
- The new mersenne prime is about 41 million digits in base 10
- The perfect number of that prime is 82 million digits
- https://www.mersenne.org/primes/perfect/perfect136279841.zip
- https://www.mersenne.org/primes/?press=M136279841
- "Euclid proved that every Mersenne prime generates a perfect number. A perfect number is one whose proper divisors add up to the number itself. The smallest perfect number is 6 = 1 + 2 + 3 and the second perfect number is 28 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14. Euler (1707-1783) proved that all even perfect numbers come from Mersenne primes. The newly discovered perfect number is 2136,279,840 x (2136,279,841-1). This number is over 82 million digits long!" (Hohum @) 16:06, 25 October 2024 (UTC)
the nature of knowagle
[edit]replace "The largest known prime number is 2136,279,841 − 1" with "The largest known prime number is currently 2136,279,841 − 1" as it is possible that a larger one could be found? Skeletons are the axiom (talk) 13:01, 11 April 2025 (UTC)
- The sentence already implies that a larger one could be found, because it says "largest known prime number", not "largest prime number". –CopperyMarrow15 (talk – edits) 16:32, 11 April 2025 (UTC)
Displayed in Full?
[edit]Would it be preferable, or even technically feasible, to be able to click to see the largest prime? Due to technical constraints the largest a Wikipedia article can be is 2 MB, and the current largest known prime is just under half that. kencf0618 (talk) 22:33, 21 May 2025 (UTC)
- Large lists of digits such this one have no encyclopedic value and have not their place in Wikipedia. The preferable solution is to give in the article only a definition of the prime and the number of its digits, and to provide in section § External links a direct link to the sequence of digiits. From WP:External links:
Some acceptable external links include those that contain further research that is accurate and on-topic, information that could not be added to the article for reasons such as copyright or amount of detail, or other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article for reasons unrelated to its accuracy.
This applies exactly to the digits of the largest known prime(s). D.Lazard (talk) 01:25, 22 May 2025 (UTC)
- I respectfully disagree; Wikipedia's mathematics articles are not for only mathematicians, but for lay people. Consider Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_Search#endnote_number_size^_‡ and its football field/Olympic pool colloquial measurement of 22 reams (11,000 sheets) of paper to help visualize the vastness of largest known prime. (One may even specify the metric as per the January 2006 prime [1], which took only three reams). The best way to visually represent the scale of the number is to present the option of viewing it; it would be unencylopedic not to. kencf0618 (talk) 22:04, 24 May 2025 (UTC)
- I don't agree with that argument, but it's moot because the prime would take up 41 MB, far more than Wikipedia's 2 MB limit.
- If you want to make it more accessible, you could direct people to the link on GIMPS's announcement of the prime. Dan Bloch (talk) 23:35, 24 May 2025 (UTC)
- I'll make the 2MB zipped file more accessible and take a photo of two stacks of 11 reams of paper. kencf0618 (talk) 12:48, 25 May 2025 (UTC)
- I respectfully disagree; Wikipedia's mathematics articles are not for only mathematicians, but for lay people. Consider Great_Internet_Mersenne_Prime_Search#endnote_number_size^_‡ and its football field/Olympic pool colloquial measurement of 22 reams (11,000 sheets) of paper to help visualize the vastness of largest known prime. (One may even specify the metric as per the January 2006 prime [1], which took only three reams). The best way to visually represent the scale of the number is to present the option of viewing it; it would be unencylopedic not to. kencf0618 (talk) 22:04, 24 May 2025 (UTC)