Scientists find world's largest prime numbers

A mind-boggling 12,978,189 digits

Iain Thomson in San Francisco

Scientists in the US and Germany have found the two largest prime numbers ever calculated in a discovery which could dramatically increase the effectiveness of cryptographic systems.

The two numbers were discovered within a fortnight of each other by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search project, which has spent 12 years on the task.

Advertisement

The largest prime number, which has a whopping 12,978,189 digits, was discovered by a team from UCLA. The second, discovered by a computer user in Germany, has 11,185,272 digits.

The search for large prime numbers (those which can only be divided by themselves or one) was sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as part of an effort to build a near-unbreakable encryption system.

"The EFF awards are about cooperation," said John Gilmore, EFF co-founder and project leader for the awards.

"Prime numbers are important in mathematics and encryption, but the real message is that many other problems can be solved by similar methods."

The UCLA team will receive a $100,000 prize from the EFF for breaking the 10,000,000 digit record. Further prizes are available, including $150,000 for the first 100,000,000 digit prime and $250,000 for the first 1,000,000,000 digit number.

Prime numbers are fundamental to cryptography systems, which take a large part of their strength from the difficulty in factoring primes. The larger the prime the more secure the encryption.

  • Have your say
  • Send to a friend
  • Print
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • Share

Do you agree?

Further reading

Google tries its hand at cryptography

KeyCzar tool opened for developer use

Dollar bills

$1m prize for cracking 'unbreakable' encryption

Permanent Privacy puts its money where its mouth is

Researchers simplify quantum cryptography

Cost and complexity reduced by new technique

Seagate adds encryption to all enterprise drives

Industry finally gets the message on security

Related whitepapers

Related jobs

Most watched

iPhone

Video Review: iPhone 3GS

We put Apple's latest iPhone through its paces

V3.co.uk weekly debrief, 5 Feb 2010

This week we cover the continuing controversy surrounding the Orange T-Mobile deal

Analysis and Reports

Using managed services to protect mobile data users from the latest security threats

Counting the cost of data security: the benefits of secured mobile services

Shifting Disaster Recovery targets with SharePoint and SQL server configurations

Using a hostbased recovery system for mission-critical systems

Poll

Adobe Flash poll

Adobe Flash poll

Do you agree with Steve Jobs about Flash being buggy?

View poll results

Advertisement

White paper library

Keep up to date with the latest products, services and technologies from the world's leading IT companies; IThound.com brings you over 6,000 white papers, case studies and analyst reports.

Advertisement

Newsletter signup

Sign up for our range of FREE newsletters:

Existing User

Newsletter user login:

Enter email address to edit your newsletter preferences

Job of the week

Search thousands of IT jobs :

Search thousands of IT jobs:

Advanced search

Hiring now on ComputingCareers:

Related IT jobs

Search thousands of IT jobs :

Search thousands of IT jobs:

Advanced search

Advertisement

Spotlight

Windows 7

Microsoft denies Windows 7 battery problems

Replacement warning functioning normally, claims software giant

Safer Internet Day

Safer Internet Day highlights online threats

Annual initiative warns of phishing, ID theft and social network...

AMD Fusion

AMD details Fusion innovations at ISSCC

Forthcoming chip with four CPU and one GPU cores will...

MSI Wind U135

Review: MSI Wind U135 netbook

A decent netbook incorporating the latest Intel technology in a...

Primary Navigation