The recent discovery of a new Mersenne prime reminds me of the imminent risk that I shall lose $20.00. Around my 80th birthday, when writing The Book of Numbers with John Conway, he guessed that no new Fermat number would be completely factored in the next 20 years. I bet him that one would. So, in the next eight months, would someone please complete the factorization of a previously unfactored Fermat number? In an amazingly generously gesture, I offer to split the $20.00 with anyone who comes up with such a factorization! R. On Thu, 21 Jan 2016, Robert Baillie wrote:

Thanks for the news!

According to http://www.mersenne.org/ GIMPS software also a flaw in Intel's latest Skylake CPUs.

Bob --- Ray Tayek wrote:

...

http://science.slashdot.org/story/16/01/20/0137259/new-mersenne-prime-discov...

_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun