ESL Adventures

As many of you know, I’m active in BOINC. One of the projects I participate in is PrimeGrid. It’s a project that helps search for prime numbers of certain types. I don’t even pretend to understand the math. I just know a prime number is one that is only divisible by one and itself (for example 3, 5, 7, 13…).   There’s a bunch of different sorts of special primes that correspond to certain formulas.  But like I said, I’m not going to even pretend to understand the intricacies of the math.  I’ve been an on again, off again participant for over a year now. I come back to it for two reasons. First, the work units themselves are short (at least for the subprojects I’ve chosen). And second, Rytis, the project administrator is a genuinely nice guy. He’s a college student in Lithuania and his English is probably better than mine.  We chat via IM at least a couple times a week.

A few hours ago, I noticed I had gotten an email. My in box has been pretty quiet over the last few days because of the holidays so I was surprised to see the email. I was even more surprised to see that I (well, my computer) had discovered a prime big enough for inclusion in “The List of Largest Known Primes“.

My prime is 28739399349*2^333333-1 and contains 100354 digits. It’s currently ranked at #4306. When I submitted it, they estimate that at the current rate of prime discovery it will remain in the top primes list for approximately 10 weeks. So I guess I get 10 weeks rather than 15 minutes of fame.

Just for fun, I took a screen shot of my current certificate of computation.