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Prime Numbers: World
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The hypothesis concerns prime numbers and has stumped the world's mathematicians for more than 150 years. Now, Professor Louis De Branges de Bourcia has posted a 23-page paper on the internet detailing his attempt at a proof. There is a $1 million prize for whoever solves the hypothesis. Full Story BBC News_ 6/10/04
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Discovering prime numbers of this size would be impossible without the distributed computing power harnessed by Entropia.com's PrimeNet system, a research computing solution created, operated and supported for GIMPS. PrimeNet coordinates more than 21,500 computers into a virtual massively parallel supercomputer for research. The computers are provided by 12,600 home Internet users, schools and businesses from around the world, and perform 720 billion calculations per second. The GIMPS project spent the equivalent of 1,650 of Intel's top-of-the-line processors running full-time for a year to find this prime number.
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Riemann discovered a geometric landscape, the contours of which held the secret to the way primes are distributed through the universe of numbers. He realized that he could use something called the zeta function to build a landscape where the peaks and troughs in a three-dimensional graph correspond to the outputs of the function. The zeta function provided a bridge between the primes and the world of geometry. As Riemann explored the significance of this new landscape, he realized that the places where the zeta function outputs zero (which correspond to the troughs, or places where the landscape dips to sea-level) hold crucial information about the nature of the primes. Mathematicians call these significant places the zeros.
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