From <...> Tue Feb  3 06:31:36 1998

Date: Mon, 02 Feb 1998 22:27:31 -0500

From: George Woltman

To: ...

Subject: Mersenne: M#37 - its official



Excerpt from

The Mersenne Newsletter, issue #13		February 2, 1998



37th Known Mersenne Prime Discovered!!!

---------------------------------------



Congratulations to Roland Clarkson.  On January 27th he discovered

that 2^3021377 - 1 is prime!  This prime number is 909,526 digits long.

The computation took 46 days part-time on his 200-MHz Pentium computer.

David Slowinski confirmed the find on January 31st.



Roland is a 19 year-old sophmore at California State University

Dominguez Hills.  He is the third youngest Mersenne prime discoverer - 

behind Noll and Nickel.  Incredibly, this was only the 8th exponent

he has tested!



Unlike the previous GIMPS finds, Roland let the PrimeNet server

(see Program News below) choose the lucky exponent.  At first,

he did not want to test the exponent.  Roland said, "I never would

have imagined two Mersenne primes would be so close together!".

In fact, in percentage terms, the gap between the 36th and 37th Mersenne

primes is the smallest ever.



To acknowledge Scott Kurowski's work on the PrimeNet server and

every GIMPS participants diligent work, official credit for this

prime will go to "Clarkson, Woltman, Kurowski, et.al.".



You can read the official press release at

http://www.mersenne.org/3021377.htm and be sure to check out

Chris Caldwell's web pages starting at

https://t5k.org/notes/3021377/