Maths Olympiad Prep

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Number theory Difficulty 5.1 AIME, harder Find the answer Philippines

Problem:

Last December 7, a computer owned by Patrick Laroche from Florida, USA determined that the number 282,589,93312^{82,589,933}-1 is a prime number. This number had a whopping 24,862,04824,862,048 digits, and is currently the largest known prime number. The computer used software provided by the GIMPS, which is a distributed computing project on the internet trying to find prime numbers of the form 2p12^{p}-1. What do you call such prime numbers?

A number or a short expression. Fractions can be typed as 3/2, and spacing doesn't matter.

Solution

Solution:

Mersenne primes

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.