Make Earth Proud! Win $100,000 ! You can do it! Kids can do it!

Somebody complained that Vleeptron has too much math(s).

Look. It's like this.

If Sentient Life On Earth goes extinct soon, and other Sentients hear our radio and see our television echoes and play our gold CDs on our robot probes someday, how will the Milky Way Galaxy remember us?

Click on Google News.

Hatred and violence. Murder. Bigotry. Fear. Greed poisoning the atmosphere and melting the ice caps.

And a little Bach and Mozart.

We'll be remembered as the little blue planet where Mozart lived, the little blue planet that choked and bombed and machine-gunned itself to death. Without any help at all from Aliens.

If you are a Sentient, please help Life On Earth survive, and please help the Milky Way Galaxy think of Earth as a fine and special and wise and lovely place.

Not the way we are right now.

And if money is important to you -- well, look, here's a way to show all the other Sentients how very smart we are (or were), and

win U$100,000

Then you can buy a Cadillac Escalade and put a really loud sound system into it and drive around the neighborhood blasting Eminem.

Of course you have to be a Brilliant Math Genius to win the money, n'est-ce pas?

Not really.

If you go digging in the Guinness Book of World Records, you'll find an astonishing thing. Several of the world's largest Prime Numbers were discovered by two high school students in California, a girl and a boy.

We've found bigger Primes since then. But the girl and the boy high school students and the Prime Numbers they discovered will stay in the record book forever.

I won't say they were ordinary or just like you and just like me. (Psst! None of us is ordinary!)

But whatever they were, they were high school students, and belonged to the Human Race.

Maybe you don't want a Cadillac Escalade. That's cool. Give the $100,000 to a homeless shelter or buy some nice land for a nature sanctuary.

What will we leave behind? Each of us can leave behind a big shitty toxic mess of hate and fear and violence and bigotry. That's easy.

Or we can leave behind beautiful music and amazingly beautiful and mysterious discoveries about numbers. We can plant trees and flowers. We can save endangered animals.

When the Sentients who come after us hear our name, they can curse or they can smile.

Do something that makes the Sentients smile. Here's something that makes Sentients smile.

~ ~ ~

from G.I.M.P.S. -- the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search

44th Known Mersenne Prime Found!

Lightning strikes twice. On September 4, 2006, in the same room just a few feet away from their last find, Dr. Curtis Cooper and Dr. Steven Boone's CMSU team broke their own world record, discovering the 44th known Mersenne prime,

(2^32,582,657) - 1

The new prime at 9,808,358 digits is 650,000 digits larger than their previous record prime found last December.

However, the new prime falls short of the 10,000,000 digits required for GIMPS to claim the Electronic Frontier Foundation $100,000 award.

With five record primes found in less than 3 years, GIMPS has been on an incredible lucky streak. Never before have Mersenne primes been bunched so closely together. When looking at the exponents, we expect only 1.78 Mersenne primes between powers of two, and prior to 2003, a maximum of 3 Mersenne primes were found between powers of two. The last 5 Mersenne prime exponents all fell between 224 and 225 -- and we haven't finished testing all the exponents in that range!

The new prime was independently verified in 6 days by Tony Reix of Bull S.A. in Grenoble, France using 16 Itanium2 1.5 GHz CPUs of a Bull NovaScale 6160 HPC at Bull Grenoble Research Center, running the Glucas program by Guillermo Ballester Valor of Granada, Spain.

Dr. Cooper and Dr. Boone could not have made this discovery alone. In recognition of contributions made by the project coordinators and the tens of thousands GIMPS volunteers, credit for this new discovery goes to "Cooper, Boone, Woltman, Kurowski, et al". The discovery is the tenth record prime for the GIMPS project. Join now and you could find the next record-breaking prime! You could even win some cash.

Perfectly Scientific, Dr. Crandall's company which developed the FFT [Fast Fourier Transform] algorithm used by GIMPS, will make a poster you can order containing the entire 9.8 million digit number. It is kind of pricey because accurately printing an over-sized poster in 1-point font is not easy! This makes a cool present for the serious math nut in your family.

[They also sell a jeweler's loupe so you can read every one of the 9,808,358 digits.]

~ ~ ~

43rd Known Mersenne Prime Found!

On December 15, 2005, Dr. Curtis Cooper and Dr. Steven Boone, professors at Central Missouri State University, discovered the 43rd Mersenne Prime,

(2^30,402,457) - 1

The CMSU team is the most prolific contributor to the GIMPS project. The discovery is the largest known prime number.

The new prime is 9,152,052 digits long. This means the Electronic Frontier Foundation $100,000 award for the discovery of the first 10 million digit prime is still up for grabs!

Dr. Cooper joined GIMPS over 7 years ago with colleague Dr. Vince Edmondson. Edmondson was instrumental in the campus-wide effort until he passed away in 2003. Cooper, Boone, and CMSU truly earned this discovery, diligently coordinating over 700 PCs!