www.mersenne.org

This domain was created as a home for the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). Mersenne primes are named after the French monk Marin Mersenne. In his day, Marin Mersenne acted as great facilitator among the mathematicians and scientists of his day. In his honor, I am collecting links to math and science projects that you can participate in. You do not need to be a math or science whiz to join in the fun.

• The one and only Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. Help find a new Mersenne prime number. Put your name in mathematics history books forever! We've found four, but there are many more waiting to be discovered.



• Mersenne Primes are hard to find, maybe you'd rather have a better chance of success by searching for smaller Proth primes. Yves Gallot has written a Windows 95 program that makes this easy! This program can also be used to find world-record twin primes and Sophie-Germain primes as well as Cunningham chains.



• Nuutti Kuosa is conducting a search for the next prime of the form N!+1.



• Help find factors of the "most wanted" composite numbers. Paul Zimmermann has founded ECMNet. Conrad Curry is organizing the all new NFSNet (number field sieve). NFS can factor numbers that ECM can't crack.



• GIMPS is also helping mathematicians factor composite numbers. Specifically, those of the form 2^N-1 and 2^N+1.



• Help find new factors of Fermat numbers.



• Tony Forbes is coordinating a search for a factor of MM61 (2^(2^61-1)-1). This is the smallest Mersenne number with a Mersenne prime exponent whose primality status is unknown.



• Find extraterrestrial intelligence! Visit Seti@Home web page to learn more.



• A Norwegian research project looking for K-optimal lattice rules has begun. Linux, IRIX, and SunOS clients are available with more on the way.



• Brian Wong wants to start a project working on Mueller modular polynomials. These polynomials are critical for efficiently counting the number of points on an eliptic curve defined modulo a prime number via the Schoof-Elkies-Atkins algorithm. Send Brian an email if you can help.



• A research project studying twin primes and Brun's constant could use your help.



• Here is a Java application to research gamma ray flux calculation could use your help. Dcypher.net is also working on this problem.



• A project to find equal sums of like powers is well under way.



• The latest encryption cracking project offers a significant cash prize. Help solve the CS-Cipher challenge. Distributed.net has also taken up the challenge with support for lots of different platforms.



• Help crack other encryption schemes. Visit the RC5 Cracking Effort site to learn more.



• Elliptic curve encryption schemes may need to be cracked. The ECC2-97 and ECCp-97 groups cracked the last two elliptic curve challenges, perhaps a new challenge will begin soon.



• We can always use a few more digits of Pi calculated. Colin Percival has begun A Distributed Project to Calculate Pi.



• Jason Moxham has been searching for multi-perfect numbers for years. He has made his program available for others to help in the search.



• Martin Gardner posed the problem of the best way to arrange circles within a square. The solution is not easy. This web site has a program to find solutions to this and similar problems.



• See how these people found a world record 10 consecutive primes in arithmetic progression. Maybe they will start a new project.

Last updated: February 26, 2000