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 he majority of the largest prime numbers that have
been discovered are known as Mersenne, named for the 17th century
French monk, Marin Mersenne, who spent a great deal of time
investigating prime numbers. Almost all of the recent largest known
prime numbers have been Mersennes.
Mersenne stated in the preface to his Cogitata
Physica-Mathematica (1644) that the numbers 2^n-1 were prime for n
= 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31, 67, 127 and 257 and were composite
for all other positive integers n
Since Mersenne's death, 2^31-1 was proved to be a prime by Euler
in 1750, and in 1876 Edouard Lucas proved 2^127-1 was also
prime.
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Nine years later, Pervouchine showed 2^61-1 was also prime, so
Mersenne had missed this one. In the early 1900's Powers showed
that Mersenne had also missed the primes 2^89-1 and 2^107-1.
Finally, by 1947 Mersenne's range, n
Presently, the largest known prime is a Mersenne prime,
2^32582657-1. This is at least the 44th Mersenne prime and was
discovered by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a
program running on thousands of computers in place of a
screensaver.
You don't need to be a genius or a computer whiz to find this
cache and Mersenne won't help you either. All you need to do is
identify the significance of the number below - you'll end up with
two 3 digit numbers to substitute into the coordinates. Do you have
the X factor to solve this one?
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