Largest Prime Number

Date: 9/8/96 at 2:15:54
From: Ted Wald
Subject: Largest Prime Number

What is the largest prime number calculated to date?

Trisha

Date: 9/8/96 at 9:41:53
From: Doctor Sarah
Subject: Re: Largest Prime Number

Hi Trisha -

Chris Caldwell's Web page, THE PRIME PAGE (the prime source for 
information about prime numbers), will tell you all about primes:

  http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/index.html   

Chris is also the author of a page called The Largest Known Primes 
with a nice "Introduction (What are primes? Who cares?)" at:  

  http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/largest.html   

This was the latest from The Largest Known Primes page as of Sept. 3, 
1996:

"On 3 September 1996, Cray Research (a subsidiary of Silicon 
Graphics), announced that David Slowinski and Paul Gage have found a 
new record prime: 2^1257787-1. The proof of this 378,632 digit 
number's primality (using the traditional Lucas-Lehmer test) took 
about 6 hours on one CPU of a CRAY T94 super computer. George Woltman, 
Richard Crandall and others independently verified the primality."

-Doctor Sarah,  The Math Forum
 Check out our web site!  http://mathforum.org/dr.math/