(www.mersenne.org)

359 points sdsykes | 1 comments | 16 Oct 24 11:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.33s | source

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But why do we have to "discover" it when we know the formula would be 2^N - 1...? Are we trying to prove a corollary or what?

1. Jabrov ◴[19 Oct 24 06:46 UTC] No.41886109[source]▶

There’s tons of numbers of the form 2^N-1 which are not prime.

To discover the primes, we have to iterate through the numbers and test their primality. With numbers that are so big, it’s very compute intensive

New Mersenne Prime discovered (probably)