Mersenne, a Sunday diversion for nerds

We nerds have always been around. Antiquity had several, like Euclid, who instead of joining his friends for a stroll around the Lighthouse (the place to be in Alexandria), preferred to stay in solving geometry theorems.

Or Archimedes, a geek who went running naked through the streets shouting Eureka! when he discovered the principle that let triremes float (though the principle for sinking them had already been discovered by the Romans).

Other sources say he was running happily because with that discovery he had won some venture capital put up by the King of Syracuse.

The Middle Ages were dominated by more fundamentalist nerds who, unable to argue about which Linux distribution was superior, filled the forums arguing about how many angels fit on the head of a pin.

Things got better in the Renaissance, and that era certainly had several famous nerds and geeks, but I want to jump a little further ahead, to tell you about a nerd who invented a sport for dorks that is still played today.

I mean Marin Mersenne, a contemporary of that philosopher, half geek, half gigolo, René Descartes, and a friend of Étienne Pascal, father of the first emo of all time: Blaise Pascal.

In those days, since they didn’t have Facebook, these characters wrote each other letters discussing the favorite subject of many geeks (to this day), number theory.

Apparently Mersenne didn’t do as well with the opposite sex as his friends Descartes and Pascal, so he became a monk and joined the Order of Minims. Back then it was a way to get a scholarship; if Mersenne were alive today he would surely be a university academic preaching the virtues of free software.

One day Mersenne set about studying a certain class of numbers, which had actually been discovered by Euclid (the dork from the beginning of this story), but since history is rather cruel, these numbers are known as Mersenne numbers.

These numbers have the boring form: 2 n-1, but they get interesting when they are also prime numbers (every geek knows what a prime number is, but if you’re one of those who think they’re a geek because they own an iPhone, or because they write a blog, it would be a good idea to visit Wikipedia and find out what these prime numbers are, so you can follow the rest and not miss the fun).

Well, finding out which are the Mersenne primes became an intellectual challenge over the last few centuries, and lately it can turn out to be quite profitable.

Because it turns out there is a prize offering 100,000 dollars to the first one to find a prime number with more than 10 million digits, and most likely the forty-sixth Mersenne number (the 46th) will have this property.

But finding Mersenne primes isn’t easy. In fact when Mersenne died only 7 Mersenne primes were known, and the eighth was discovered by Euler, almost 200 years later.

So far 44 have been found, and the last 10 were discovered through a distributed computing project called GIMPS (the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search).

These days geeks no longer look for prime numbers on a blackboard, or with pencil and paper, but with the computer (let’s be honest, we geeks look for everything with the computer, even a girlfriend). And now, thanks to the internet, we can put to use the idle time of thousands of computers on the net.

GIMPS is a project where you sign up, install a little program on your computer, and it connects to a central server. While you aren’t using your computer, the program devotes itself to computing possible Mersenne prime candidates.

That is how a group of geeks have added their names to the history of mathematics, because they lent their CPU to find a number.

It was recently announced that the possible candidate for the 45th Mersenne number may have been found, but we’ll have to wait until the first half of September to confirm it, and to see whether it manages to break the barrier set by the EFF’s prize.

So you still have time. If you’re interested in collecting a share of those 100,000 dollars, and entering the mathematics hall of fame, you can join the GIMPS project.

Update:

It’s now confirmed that we have found the forty-fifth Mersenne number. Cheers!

But the forty-sixth Mersenne number was found as well, so the GIMPS guys are going to cash their 100,000-dollar check. How about that?

More details at mersenne.org