Mathematicians at the University of California could be in line for a $120,600 prize for finding a new prime number. The newly discovered number is made up of 13 million digits. Who is offering the prize?

elburcher

The $100,000 prize is being offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for finding the first Mersenne prime with more than 10 million digits. The foundation supports individual rights on the Internet and set up the prime number prize to promote cooperative computing using the Web. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,429201,00.html Sep 27 08, 7:54 PM

looney_tunes

Absolutely correct. (I should have translated Australian dollars to US dollars before posting my original question!) On August 23, Edson Smith, a systems engineer for the Program in Computing laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles in California, United States, confirmed the primality of the number through his work as a volunteer in the distributed computing project known as the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS. This new prime qualifies GIMPS for a $100,000 award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), offered to the first person or group to discover a prime number of 10 million digits or more. According to GIMPS' prize agreement, $50,000 will be given to the UCLA Department of Mathematics, $25,000 will be given to charity, $20,000 will be split among previous discoverers of Mersenne primes, and GIMPS will keep the remainder for funding and other uses. http://www.mister-info.com/?cmd=displaystory&story_id=11175&format=html Sep 27 08, 8:01 PM